


A Lack of Wisdom

by Aethelar



Category: Naruto
Genre: Fourth wall who, Gen, Self-Insert, Self-Insert as Sasuke, Slow Burn, Team as Family, Trans Female Character
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-04-07
Updated: 2020-11-13
Packaged: 2021-03-01 20:14:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 38
Words: 224,259
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23532889
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aethelar/pseuds/Aethelar
Summary: It's a self insert fic. You know the drill.Featuring a grumpy protagonist who wants mochi, clean socks, and to maintain possession of their life and eyeballs in that order, a troll-dad sensei who's genuinely trying to understand the pint sized weirdos he's been saddled with but isn't sure where to start, and two team mates who are honest to god twelve year olds who canonically didn't mature untilafterthe handy dandy time skip.Where, please, is the unsubscribe button, because I'd like to request a different afterlife.
Relationships: Dai-nana-han | Team 7 & Uchiha Sasuke
Comments: 2545
Kudos: 3897
Collections: A Collection of Beloved Inserts, Best Fics From Across The Multiverse, Favorite Self-Insert and OC-Centric Fanfics, Good stories I like, My Self-insert's Library, Team 7 🌀, The Last Rec List, fics that hit different, why im sleep deprived 💖✨, wwwwwww





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> The title is from Terry Pratchett: "Wisdom comes from experience. Experience is often a result of a lack of wisdom."
> 
> It's a character driven found family fic where we make bad choices and live through the consequences. Have at it.
> 
> Unless any of the following are not for you, in which case have at something else: drowning, gender dysphoria (female reincarnated-ish in male body), general purpose ninja stabby times.

It’s a self insert fic. You know the drill: it starts when I die.

For me, that death was drowning. I won’t bore you with the details - it was stupid, it was avoidable, it was a waste, it was fucking unpleasant and panic inducing, that’s all you need to know. My chest burned, I held my breath until my body rebelled and breathed for me and then my _throat_ burned, I choked, I think I screamed, my head swam -

When it stopped, I was in an empty place. Dark, but a strange kind of grey-dark, as though everything was visible even though there was no light. Too quiet. You know how normal quietness still has noise? No, I didn’t know either, not until it was taken away. I couldn’t even hear the faint rushing of blood in my ears, the huffs of my breath, that annoying ringing that always seems to crop up when there are no other sounds.

Just… quiet. Quiet and not-dark.

I don’t know how long I spent there waiting for something to happen. When nothing did, I started walking, and I don’t know how long I spent doing that either. Sorry; it’s not the best start to a fic when the protagonist just wanders aimlessly and tries to work out if she’s gone mad, but it’s what I’ve got. A whole boatload of empty and a lot of walking.

The crying, when I heard it, was so out of place that it took me a while to recognise it.

“Hello?” I called out, half expecting my voice not to work. I got no response, so maybe it didn’t, but the crying was louder now, and clearer.

I turned and followed it. My feet started clicking against the floor - stones, like an old street, and I was wearing unfamiliar blocky sandals. “Hello? Are you ok?” I tried again.

The street started getting clearer - I can’t describe how; it wasn’t like a fog was lifting, or like it was getting easier to see. Just… There hadn’t been a street, and now there was a vague impression of a street. A few more steps, and the vague impression became an outline, shadows marking where windows and gaps between houses were, the tentative beginnings of street-smells, a pain starting in my chest.

I stopped. When I pressed a hand to my chest I felt nothing there, but the pain wouldn’t go away. Also, I was wearing - a dressing gown? A robe?

“If you’re there, could you say something? Please?”

The person kept crying. I grit my teeth; I could go back, into the grey and the silence where I wasn’t drowning, but they sounded like a child. I kept going.

The shadowy street had resolved itself into an archaic looking suburb, lit by a disturbingly red moon and liberally strewn with bloodstains - though, thankfully, no bodies - by the time I found them. At least, I assumed it was a suburb; there were houses, gardens, areas of packed dirt and stone that marked paths. No cars, and the architecture was clearly foreign, but there were flowers in some of the windows, even a couple of houses with colourful awnings and signs out the front that I assumed were shops.

The child was in the doorway to one of the larger houses, silhouetted against the light from inside. He huddled against the door frame, arms around his knees, and stared into the room as though he couldn’t tear his eyes away.

I pushed aside the pain in my chest. Which was stupid. Pain is important and ignoring it leads to more pain. I know this now.

But I pushed it aside, and knelt down next to him. “Hey,” I said. I glanced inside the room, but other than a tacky blood stain in the centre it seemed empty. “Hey, what’s wrong?”

He ignored me. I hesitated, chewing on my lip, then reached out a tentative hand and touched his shoulder. “Hey, c’mon kid -”

He swung round to stare at me with wide, red eyes, and that pain in my chest? The one I’d ignored like the idiot I was? Yeah, that exploded. Literally. Into a fucking _sword_ sticking out my sternum.

The boy sobbed something, hands scrabbling desperately at my dressing-gown-robe, and when I opened my mouth to say something I choked on my own blood, my lungs flooded with red from the stab wound, and I drowned.

_Delightful._

He screamed, I screamed, and suddenly the sword was gone and my lungs were filled with air again. “What the hell _-_ ”

“Otouto,” a voice said behind me. The boy flinched; I looked back just in time to see _another_ creepy kid with red eyes - though admittedly, this one was older than the tiny scrap crying in my arms - before he put a hand on my shoulder to hold me still and stabbed me again.

I choked. I drowned. The smaller kid and I screamed.

“Otouto,” the older kid said, and the whole thing started again.

What the _hell._

Now, I know what you’re thinking. Actually that’s a lie; I haven’t a clue what you’re thinking, but if _I_ were reading this fic I’d be thinking: that’s Uchiha Itachi, this is Tsukuyomi, and the little kid is Sasuke. Obvious, right? Probably because it’s tagged up there in the tagging bit. Well, bully for you. What _I_ was thinking was more along the lines of: how many fucking times can a girl die before it stops hurting, and the answer to that was apparently _at least one more time you miserable sod_.

“Make it stop,” the littler kid sobbed for the god knows how many-th time.

“Wish I could,” I gurgled through a wet cough. I’d tried standing up, but the combination of one child holding onto me with a death grip and the other continually skewering me with a sword was a tricky one to get out of. Neither seemed keen on letting me go, so. More stabby times. Joy _._

“I want to go,” he continued, hiccoughing his way through the words, and the already short threads of my temper broke.

“Then go,” I snapped. I pushed him away from me, _again,_ and tried to turn him to face down the street, but it was like pushing a concrete wall. “Go down the street. It’s quiet. No one stabs you. You can -” I had to break off there for the obligatory hacking-choking-bloody _disgustingness_ of a sword in my lungs, and as much as it hurt it just _annoyed_ me so much that I turned on the emotionless preteen behind me and spat the blood in his face.

“Can you _not?_ ” I snarled.

There was a pause. For the first time, the boy focussed his red eyes on me. “Why?”

“Are you kidding me,” I hissed out. He stared at me, unblinking, so no, apparently not. “Your brother wants to leave,” I said instead. I felt like I was at my grandma’s house, asking if my little cousin could get down from the dinner table. “Will you let him go?”

His gaze slid past me to land on his brother, and I swear, he glitched and reset. The hand was back on my shoulder. I was facing forward again - I hadn’t turned back, hadn’t moved, I just _was_ , and the sword was resting against my back.

“Otouto,” he said, same inflection, a recording on repeat. The littler kid turned to me with wide, desperate eyes.

“Get out of here,” I said, pushing him again, and this time, _thank fucking god,_ he went. The first two steps were stumbled, hovering and unsure, then the sword appeared in my chest and he flinched and ran.

 _Finally,_ I thought. The house started destabilising as he got further away, the street fluctuating in and out of real. My lungs filled with blood, my scream stuck in my throat, I choked, the boy disappeared over the grey horizon and the last remains of the house collapsed in on me as I drowned -

“Otouto,” Itachi said, and I huddled in the door and cried as he put a hand on my mother’s shoulder and ran her through with his sword.

“You are not worth killing,” he said, my big brother, the one I loved more than anything in the world. “When you have the same eyes as I do, come and stand before me.”

And yeah, _maybe_ at this point I should have realised what was going on, but hey. I didn’t have the tags. Do me a favour and let me know if there’s any major character death coming up in my future? Other than baby Sasuke, who I’m now pretty sure I sent off into the great unknown to die in my place.

And, you know, all those other people who canonically died in the Naruto series.

Ah, shit. I just killed Itachi’s baby brother. The baby brother he murdered an entire clan for. In a roundabout, extremely fucked up logic kind of way, but still. That there is a mass murderer and the one person he had left to care about has just shuffled his merry way off this mortal coil and it’s my fault.

_Shit._

But, I’m getting ahead of myself. It took… several repetitions of the illusion, plus an _extremely_ alarming wake up in a hospital room for me to cotton on to what had happened. Not that I actually understand it - though most self insert fics have a pretty tenuous explanation for how the main character ends up in their fictional world of choice, so. Par for the course, I guess.

What I did know was this: when Sasuke left, his memories didn’t. Neither, thankfully, did the basic skills he’d picked up; I could speak, I could read, I could _walk_ in this _pathetically tiny body_ \- I mean, seriously? I know Uchiha’s were meant to be delicate and everything, but Sasuke’s a twig. A shrimpy twig. He’s a _splinter_.

I’m a splinter. I need to get used to this; the shrimpy twig body with the pale skin and the - oh god - penis attached to it is _my_ shrimpy twig body.

In case you were wondering, I am pretending the penis doesn’t exist, and stubbornly sitting down to pee. You probably were not wondering. I apologise for sharing, and shall go back to being traumatised by my male body parts in the privacy of my own head.

“Uchiha-kun?” the nurse asked, tilting his head in concern at my strangled whimper. “Are you ok?”

I frantically shoved thoughts of gender dysphoria and _reality_ dysphoria out my head and cast around for something plausible to say. “My parents are dead,” I said. It was true, after all - I even had Sasuke’s emotional attachment to them, though it was muted and not as strong as the feelings for - for my -

“My parents,” I repeated hollowly. “All the cousins. _Granny_.”

It hit me. I was dead. I said I wouldn’t talk about my life before, it’s not important to the fic and it doesn’t _matter_ , but I hadn’t realised how much that didn’t stop it mattering to me. Everyone I knew, everyone I loved - I’d never see them again. I was dead.

“They are,” the nurse said, pragmatic to a fault. I made a punched-out, wounded sound. “But they’ll be watching over you from the pure lands, so you best make them proud, ne?” He smiled and handed me a chocolate pudding.

I took it on autopilot, then a second later the spoon he put in my hand as well. “But they’re gone,” I protested, still trying to wrap my head around the enormity of what I’d lost. Me me and Sasuke me. I wanted, desperately, to run to my big brother and for him to say something to make the world right again.

Not _you are not worth killing._ Something better than that. Like, _here’s some dango, don’t tell Tou-san_ or, _do you want me to show you how to throw a shuriken,_ or, just, you know, _silly Otouto, it’ll be ok_.

Except I couldn’t. Because he’d killed the clan and dragged me out of the afterlife I was meant to be in and taken himself off to be an S rank missing nin. Like an idiot.

“They’re gone,” the nurse allowed, “But you aren’t, Uchiha-kun. Eat your pudding, and then we can see about getting you home again.”

In the face of his extreme practicality I bowed to the inevitable and ate my pudding.


	2. Chapter 2

Home, as it turned out, was the Uchiha compound. I’d wondered - my knowledge of the show was patchy (something about a rabbit? I stopped watching after the time skip, most of my later-Naruto knowledge came from other fics if I’m honest with you) but I did know that Sasuke had been living by himself by the time he’d graduated the academy. Seven and recently orphaned seemed a bit young to me for him to be left to his own devices, but apparently my views and the ninja village’s views didn’t match here; I was escorted to the Uchiha clan gates, given a packet of legal and financial documents that I would probably get round to reading when I was hungry enough to need money, and left to my own devices.

What the fuck, Konoha. We were talking about a child. I mean, not really, because we were talking about me and I was at least nominally an adult, but as far as anyone in the village knew, _child_. Seven years old. Seven! No wonder Sasuke in canon grew up to be such a screwball of issues and insecurities. He still slept with a fricken’ plushie for crying out loud.

The plushie in question was, of course, a soft and floppy weasel. Shisui brought it back for him from a mission to Tea country and Sasuke decided it was the best thing ever. It had its own headband. Shisui laughed his ass off and Itachi rolled his eyes and poked me in the forehead but I _knew_ he liked it, he was just being annoying like big brothers always are and -

I cut the memory off before it could go any further and shoved it roughly to the back of my mind. I couldn’t see my escort anywhere, but these were ninja I was dealing with; maybe they actually _were_ being vaguely responsible adults and keeping an eye on me. Or maybe they weren’t. Either way, I didn’t feel like crying in the middle of the street, so I tucked the document packet under one arm, stuffed my hands in my pockets, and angled myself down the path to my house.

I kept my eyes forward as I walked. There were no bodies - which was good! I didn’t want bodies. The funerals would be happening over the next few days; they’d waited for me to be present as the new clan head, but the bodies had at least been collected and cleaned and all the rest of it.

Eyes harvested, you know how it goes.

Still, though, the lack of bodies made the rest of it surreal. Everywhere looked like there should be people around, gardens still neatly tended, a light left on and visible through the window, tables and chairs carefully stacked by the bakery my mother got her mochi from - but, no people. It was _creepy_.

The house, when I got to it, was even creepier. What did Sasuke do in canon? Did he stay there, did he take one of the smaller houses?

“I’m home,” I mumbled to no one, pushing the door open and flicking on the light. I glanced up from kicking off my shoes, eyes catching on the bare floor where the tatami mats had been cleared away, and my lungs froze as I realised where I was.

This was the doorway I’d watched from as Itachi killed my parents, over and over and over. This was the doorway I’d been trapped in as he stabbed me and I drowned and the blood dribbled out over my chin as my chest screamed from the pain of it. Over and over and over.

“No,” I said, and slammed the door. “Nuh-uh. No. Goodbye. _No._ ”

There was a back entrance from the garden to the kitchen. I scrambled over the fence, sidestepped the sozu fountain, and resolutely ignored the grand shoji paper doors to the main part of the house. The kitchen door was small and held very few memories. _Perfect._

It was only after I was inside that I realised I was still without shoes and had to gingerly brush the soil off my feet with my hands. There wasn’t a genken in the kitchen, unsurprisingly, so I made do without slippers. Otherwise though there was a kettle, tea, probably enough food in the cupboards to make dinner, and, if I pushed the kotatsu to one side, space to lay a futon on the floor. I’d have to venture into the main part of the house to get supplies - maybe I could clear out the sideboard and store clothes in it? - and to use the bathroom, but otherwise I was golden.

“This is fine,” I said. “This is better than fine. This is exactly what I need. I like studio apartments. _Cosy_. Yes.”

I put my hands on my hips and surveyed my new living quarters. A tall stool by the counter - it may be normal to the Sasuke part of me to kneel on the floor, but a) I needed the kotatsu out for space reasons and b) no - maybe a mirror and some slightly more cheerful and less reservedly imposing pictures for the wall, it’d be delightful.

“What do you think, Plushie-tan,” I said, fetching the weasel from my room along with an armful of high collared shirts and white shorts. We’d need some changes to _that_ ensemble, oh yes we would. “It’s our new home. Do you like it?” I dumped the clothes in a pile on the floor and put the weasel in pride of place on my futon.

Plushie-tan leaned listlessly to the side. I took that to be approval and sat cross legged next to him, curling my toes under the blanket. It would be better if the bed was western style, at least you could _pretend_ that was also a sofa, but a futon was what I had. I predicted a lot of sitting on the floor in my future, and resolved to move the stool up the priority list - there was casual dining and then there was eating every meal in bed, and one of them felt a bit too much like depression for my liking.

“It’s not much,” I allowed, “But it’s just a start. We’ll get better from here, you’ll see.”

We had to. I didn’t know if anyone was watching still so I didn’t list anything out loud, nor would I risk writing anything down - even in English, or any combination of code I could come up with. _I_ knew that Itachi was still a good guy and loved me and would never betray the village, but to everyone else he was evil incarnate and a complete wild card. If his brother, who he not only left alive despite killing the entire rest of the clan but _also_ dragged into a genjutsu that no one else was party to, started acting and behaving suspiciously? Well, that would probably set alarm bells ringing. Even though the Hokage knew that Itachi was acting on orders, he couldn’t afford to let the rest of the clans know. He’d have to treat me as a potential flight risk. Traitor risk? Whatever you called it. Sleeper agent, maybe.

And if not the Hokage, then Konoha was still home to Danzo. He hadn’t got Sasuke in canon, but a baby Uchiha left all on his lonesome would be a tempting target - I couldn’t risk catching his interest either. Not to mention everyone _outside_ Konoha. Was Orochimaru after a Sharingan yet, or would that come later once his body started deteriorating? And Obito’s mad crusade against the Uchihas, did that extend to me? Not a clue. Hell, for all I knew Sasuke was fending off kidnapping attempts left right and centre before the show opened, and the only reason he survived was because Itachi’s crazy mind fuckery motivated him to train like heck and be the rookie of the year.

I gripped Plushie-tan convulsively tighter.

In a world where eyeballs were passed around like balloon animals at a clown convention, I was in possession of two highly prized specimens and I had approximately _zero_ ability to protect them. How many Sharingan were there in the world now? Itachi had two. Danzo had too many. Kakashi had one. Obito had one. Madara? Was he a thing? Was he just Obito, or was there actually a Madara before Obito started pretending to be him? Shit. I had enough foreknowledge that if anyone found out I’d be screwed, but not enough to actually know what was happening.

But, point was: if you wanted a sharingan, I was the obvious target. And I wasn’t even safe if I dropped out of ninjaing and stayed in the village; even if the village allowed it to happen on the surface, Danzo would never let a resource like that be wasted. The best I could hope for would be to be put out for stud when I was old enough to have kids.

My mind baulked. Penis. _Ugh._

“Plushie-tan,” I said, swallowing around an uncomfortably dry throat. “I think we need to train like heck and be the rookie of the year. You know, to. Make the clan proud.” And survive and shit. Hell.

I was seven now. I had - how many years was it until Sasuke graduated? Three? Four? Six? - some years. During that time I had to lay a foundation for any knowledge I didn’t want to hide that I had, get strong enough to have a hope of keeping my eyeballs in my face, and work out a plan for what I was going to do when canon started and plot things happened.

And get a stool for my tiny kitchen home.

It’d be _fine_.

Spoiler: it was not fine.

The funerals were painful, but survivable. Uchiha liked fire - understandable, I did too, it was _infinitely_ superior to water and anything remotely wet or cold or dark - so cremation was the order of the day, and with no clan and no elders, the speeches were blissfully short.

The bodies burnt before I had chance to check if the eyes were missing or not. I knew they were, at least some of them, but now I had no way of saying how I knew.

The house, once I’d retrieved what I needed from it and settled myself firmly into just the kitchen and the closest bathroom, was fine. I kept the doors closed, I made sure to walk round the outside on sunny days and lever open some of the windows to air the rooms I didn’t use, and otherwise I ignored them. If priceless artifacts of clan history were being eaten by moths and rotting away, well, I wasn’t there to see it.

What I _was_ there to see was the garden. In traditional Japanese style it made use of water features and plenty of natural beauty, with only a few spots of colour to break up the green - white camellia flowers in winter, pink cherry in spring, brighter pink lotuses for two short but very pretty weeks in summer. Even red maple in autumn, if we’re counting leaves as well as flowers. In traditional _ninja_ style it was dotted here and there with some of the most poisonous substances fire country - and, in fact, most of our neighbours - could grow. I vaguely recalled my mother taking me round to point them out once, along the lines of ‘don’t touch those Sasuke, you’ll die’.

I can’t claim to be the best gardener, but I think I did alright. None of the koi died, and rustically unpruned was an achievable look. I hadn’t yet got to grips with all the poisonous plants, but I recognised a few from academy teachings and a few others from the assorted scrolls and libraries I’d raided, so. Progress.

Yes, fine, I went through the parts of the clan compound that didn’t leave me reeling from bad memories and I shamelessly stole anything that looked shiny, interesting, or useful. It happens in every self insert. Shocker; those of us that write self insert fics tend to be people who like to read. It’s comforting. You’ll be pleased to know that I won’t bore you with the many hours I spent reading the night away with only Plushie-tan for company, but you’ll be sad to know - I hope, unless you’re rooting for me crash and burn, which, rude - that those hours yielded jack-all in the usefulness front.

Paranoid ninja not writing things down. Paranoid ninja hiding the things they do write down. Paranoid ninja sealing the things they write down away and _not writing down how to get past the seals._

Fucking ninja.

I did manage to get a handy dandy immolation jutsu to use for the funerals, though given that you needed to lay your palms ritualistically on two major tenketsu to activate it and it took almost a minute to heat up, I wasn’t going to be using that one in battle much. Also poetry. A lot of poetry.

And a stool! It took me a week or so, but I did find a stool for my kitchen counter so I could now _officially_ sit down to eat. I was _winning._

So, with this list of fabulous successes, you might be wondering why I say it wasn’t fine. To which I answer: the academy.

I might not know how children are meant to act but I’m pretty sure they’re not meant to act like this.

They were just… weird? I knew, theoretically, that things happened much younger in Konoha than I was used to back home - genin were considered adults, I’d been living alone since I was seven, tiny people could be promoted to chunin in a war, ANBU armour came in size extra small - I knew all this. But I guess I just assumed that Konoha foisted a lot of responsibility on kids and the kids were… still kids?

I’m not explaining this well, but the point is that the academy students were _way_ too mature for their age. I guess if I’d come across child soldiers in my first world I’d think the same thing about them, but it still threw me how someone less than four feet tall could reason their way through a logical argument about how to kill people the way a seasoned adult would. Sure, they lacked some life lessons and experience to draw on, and very few of them were what I would call emotionally well rounded - though not many of the adult ninja were either so huh - but they grasped concepts of responsibility, decision making, strategy, hell even _politics_ better than a lot of people I’d known who were three times their age.

And then they’d turn around in the same breath and make a fart joke. I was _so confused._

Maybe I just didn’t know how kids worked? Maybe this was normal? Maybe Nara Shikamaru was not an alien creature masquerading as a lazy pineapple child and was in fact a genuinely average human being?

Nah. Genius or not, Shikamaru was too smart. Nothing about him even began to approach normal, and if you’d ever been subjected to him staring you down because you dared try to sit next to Chouji at lunch time, you’d know _exactly_ what I was talking about.

I didn’t know if it was chakra at work, or just intensive social conditioning, but I could kind of maybe see why the village treated people as adults at a much younger age than I was used to. I didn’t agree with it, and I still stand by the fact that leaving canon-Sasuke by himself severely messed with his head, but I could see how it could happen.

I could not see how I was meant to fit into it.

I was allowed some slack. Sasuke had gone through some major life changes; I wasn’t expected to be the same as I was before Itachi killed everyone. At the same time, Sasuke had actually been quite a childish child, and suddenly flipping that into a mature adult personality would be too stark a change to pass off. Going the other way though and acting overly childish would be immediately spotted and questioned.

So I settled for not… doing either? I don’t know, my Sasuke-memories of how things were before did very little to prepare me for this. I figured it was safer to keep my distance, that’s all. I didn’t actually _mean_ to be rude and an asshole, but there were a couple of western culture things which apparently didn’t translate, and by the time I’d sorted myself out and remembered the important things - like pointing, pointing bad - my reputation was well and truly established.

The fact that I was training or reading every minute of every day because I didn’t want to die and also had no friends didn’t really help either, because now I was standoffish, rude, and showed everyone else up at target practice. _Great._

“I’m just glad I’ve got you, Plushie-tan,” I said, talking to the stuffed toy weasel I still kept on my bed as a twelve year old. “I think you’re the only one who ever listens to me, you know? If it wasn’t for you, I’d’ve gone mad years ago. You and the fish. I should be nicer to the fish. It’s not their fault they live in water like actual savages, I’m sure they’d breathe air if they could.”

I dropped out of the handstand I was doing on the kitchen counter and bent over backwards until my socked feet hit the floor. Ninja-flexibility. Me and my twig body were _owning_ it.

“Special day today, though,” I continued, swinging neatly into a low crouch and continuing my morning routine. “We get put in teams. I might end up with new people to talk to, you never know.” I chewed my lip, a bad habit I’d never managed to break myself out of, then gave my head a rough shake. “Maybe not.”

Knowing that in the original story Sasuke had been on a team with Sakura and Naruto made it difficult to treat them impartially. I knew who they’d become in the future - or at least, in a version of the future that may or may not still happen - and I knew that it had taken them a while and a convenient time skip to get there. As of now though they were both annoying. I mean. _Really_ annoying.

Ok, so maybe I came by some of my asshole reputation honestly, sue me.

It was true though. Naruto was loud and obnoxious, Sakura was louder and also obnoxious, except when she was talking to me in which case she was quiet and breathy and still obnoxious. _How_ the fangirl phenomenon had started I had no idea. Why it had fixated on me I had no idea. How to make it stop I had _no idea._ Whether I was a grown woman with a boy’s memories or a boy with a grown woman’s memories, the whole concept of it weirded me out.

Just. Why. I was awkward and I had shitty hair. Go crush on Chouji, he’s made of sweetness and light and he shares food. He’s worth braving Shikamaru for, _that’s_ how good he is.

But still: Sakura and Naruto were the two main characters the story’d focussed on, and I didn’t know how to treat them. Naruto ended up saving the world, if I changed anything would I put that in jeopardy? I didn’t even know _how_ he saved the world. Probably with Sakura, but Sasuke… was there? Wasn’t there? I think he survived, because I think he and Sakura had a kid, but I also think he tried to kill Naruto at various points and was the cause of a lot of heartache and pain. Following in those footsteps didn’t sound like something a good person would do, so I should probably change at least _some_ of the story line. Just… not enough to make the world end.

I hadn’t yet worked out where that balance was, and as good a listener as Plushie-tan was, he wasn’t great at providing answers.

“I need to get you a magic-eight ball,” I told him, and flipped out of the last position in a satisfyingly boneless stretch. “I also need to get dressed. Don’t look.” I threw my pyjama top over him to cover his eyes, then padded over to the sideboard and pulled out an assortment of clothes. Black trousers, black arm protectors, black shirt pulled inside out so the grey lining showed instead… I had a theme. The only reason the shirt was grey side out was because it was Itachi’s old shirt and I was attached to it, but black on black on black was a bit much even for me. Also, when I wore it this way you couldn’t see where I’d unpicked the clan symbol from the back, and it wasn’t quite so obvious to anyone else that I’d raided my big brother’s room for clothes when I grew out of my own. I was meant to hate him for killing everyone and everything, it would look odd.

You’ve got to think of these things, see. Because ninja.

The other thing you’ve got to do is cut out the front of the freakishly high collar so you can breathe, because things - even fabric things - that block the nose and mouth area are _no._

“All good, Plushie-tan. Clothes on, you can look again.”

I drank a glass’s worth of orange juice directly out of the carton and cracked a raw egg over last night’s reheated rice in the rice cooker. Add fish for extra protein and follow with a kaki fruit because I _still_ can’t let go of the fact that breakfast should have something sweet in it, damnit, and I’m set. Today I’d find out which genin team I was assigned to and - more importantly - whether leaving Naruto to fail his graduation test was the right choice or not.

“See you later,” I called to Plushie-tan, slipping my feet into - yup - black sandals and letting myself out the back door. “Wait, shit, headband -” I already had shoes on so I leaned in as far as I could, wiggling my fingers and tugging on the dark fabric with chakra until it fell off the side and into my hand.

“ _Now_ see you later. Ciao.”

Headband on, fringe carefully pulled out so it wasn’t making my forehead itchy, and I was good to go. Yes, I still had the fluffy Sasuke duck-butt. It appeared to be genetic, and the one time I’d tried growing my hair out I’d come dangerously close to looking like my mum. I did not have Itachi’s ability to rock long hair and still look manly, oh no.

… I’m well aware that I spent two and half decades being a girl. The penis and I were still in a complicated relationship. I missed being able to wear leggings and crop tops. I also, in this body, looked ridiculous as a miniature version of my mum.

By the time I arrived at the academy, my nerves had soured any good mood I’d been in that morning. I couldn’t see Naruto; what if he hadn’t got the scroll and gone through everything with Mizuki and Iruka? Should I have done something to make sure he passed?

No, there was nothing I _could_ do. Naruto was a mess, there was no way on earth he’d have learnt the standard bunshin. Besides, kage bunshin was his signature move, I couldn’t risk him not getting it. Or not finding out about the kyuubi. Not having the bonding moment with Iruka, Mizuki not being exposed as a traitor - there were a lot of important things that happened last night, ok?

That hopefully happened. That better have happened or so help me Naruto there will be _consequences_.

To make things worse, Shikamaru was sat on the wrong side of Chouji. Technically I could squeeze past him to get to Chouji’s other side, but that seemed a bit too pointed. I took the open seat next to Shino instead, inclined my head at him in the barest of hellos, and slouched down in what was not a sulk because I wasn’t actually a child, thank you very much.

Chouji waved at me. I was too distracted to notice in time, and Shikamaru gave me the stink eye. Ino started berating him while Sakura cooed something nonsensical at me. I sunk further in my seat and wished Shino were a bit more intimidating so everyone else would go away.

At this point, thank _fuck_ , Naruto appeared, headband squarely in place and presence so unapologetically loud it was impossible to miss. _I have never been so glad to see you in my life,_ I thought fervently, quickly followed by _what the hell get out of my face why are you so close._

“Uzumaki,” I said, cutting across whatever he was saying. “Get your shoes off my desk. That’s disgusting.”

“Just wait bastard! I’ll be a better ninja than you’ll ever be, you’ll eat your words when I’m done with you!”

“Shoes. Desk. _Off._ ”

“Naruto! Stop being so rude to Sasuke-kun!”

“ _I’m_ rude, what about - hey Sakura-chan, what about _him_ being rude, huh?”

“Enough!” Iruka yelled from the front of the class. Naruto squawked and overbalanced, tipping forward in perfect position to crack his forehead against mine. I could’ve caught him, but I doubted he’d thank me for it, so I reached my chakra for the empty chair next to Chouji. One kawarimi later and I was where I’d wanted to be from the start, Naruto went face first into the back of the chair that had replaced me, and Shikamaru couldn’t glare at me without losing his napping position.

“Morning,” I greeted Chouji with a smug smile. “I brought strawberries.”

“I brought chips,” Chouji said and handed them over like the ray of purity and sunshine he was. Suck on _that_ , Nara.

“Bastard!” Naruto yelled from his upside down position next to Shino, and the blood vessel on Iruka’s forehead throbbed as he clenched his teeth.

Business as usual, then.


	3. Chapter 3

“Team Seven… Haruno Sakura, Uzumaki Naruto, and Uchiha Sasuke!”

I slumped down in my seat with a muffled groan of relief. I’d done it. Five years - _five fucking years -_ in the Naruto world and this was my greatest achievement: I had successfully avoided screwing up the formation of Team Seven. I was _officially_ progressing with the start of the plot. Yippee kaiyai, I was going to die.

Dear fucking lord, I was on Team Seven at the start of the plot. I was going to _die._

“Here,” Chouji said, sympathetically passing me a mochi.

“I love mochi,” I answered, and shoved the whole thing in my mouth before I could accidentally say anything else. How Chouji kept the ice cream inside from melting I had no idea, but he’d found out my weakness a year ago and now sprung them on me at random moments when I needed them most. If I hadn’t stopped myself speaking I might accidentally confess that I loved Chouji too, and then Shikamaru would genuinely use his shadow to walk me into the river and leave me there.

“We can have mochi as a team, Sasuke-kun!”

On second thought, dying. What a lovely idea.

Much as I wanted to crash the newly formed Team Ten’s lunch, I settled for flipping Shikamaru off and leaving them to it. Ino was with them, which meant Sakura would be without her usual partner and - knowing my luck - searching for her new team mates to eat with instead. Or searching for one of her new team mates.

In the spirit of teamwork and protecting my precious people, I hid behind one of the lesser used buildings and ate my lunch perched on a beaten up training post. Noodles, fish, tomato sauce; it wasn’t Granny’s famous tuna bolognese, but it was as close as I could get with the ingredients available to me. It was my comfort food, and I’m blaming it entirely for the fact that I didn’t notice Naruto sneaking up until he was almost directly above me.

“Uzumaki,” I said around a mouthful of tomato. “What the hell are you doing.”

His face screwed up in an angry pout. “Bastard! What does Sakura-chan see in you, huh?”

“Fuck if I know. I think she just has bad taste.”

“Don’t insult Sakura-chan!” He finally dropped from his awkward crouch in the tree, swiping at me as he went past. I dodged, trying to both keep my noodles upright and avoid getting tangled in the thirty feet of rope that he pulled from god knows where, but apparently Naruto’s complete disregard for proper nutrition trumped my attempts to protect my lunch. It went flying, he and I went sprawling, and though I avoided the worst of the rope it tangled unpleasantly tightly around my wrists.

“Why,” I ground out, glaring as I started working my hands loose. He answered with a ram seal and a poof of chakra, transforming into an exact replica of me. Almost exact. I don’t grin like that.

“Hah! If you won’t tell me then I’ll just ask her, then when she realises it’s actually me and I beat you she’ll - _hey!_ ”

I gave up on the last of the rope. My hands were free enough; I lunged upwards, kicking out at him and using an elbow to aim for where I knew his solar plexus was. That’s the issue with henge; it’s an illusion, it changes how you look, but the solid you underneath doesn’t change. It makes for an easy way to throw off an opponent, unless of course they saw you change and are familiar enough with your actual body to -

I missed. What the fuck. What the fuck? My elbow skidded along his ribs, and he used my moment of lost balance to slam me back against the training post and pin down the knot holding my wrists in place.

“Sasuke-kun!” someone gasped, with perfectly horrendous timing because apparently the universe hated me.

“No,” I said, glaring at Naruto and refusing to look.

“Sakura-chan!”

“No,” I repeated, finally getting my hand out. I pinched his ear until he dropped both me and the henge with a pained whine and backed away from both of them, Naruto rubbing his ear and scowling at me, Sakura looking between the two of us and the post with her face suspiciously red.

You are _twelve_ kindly desist from perving on me. On anyone. _Urgh._

“I,” I said with as much dignity as I could, “Am going to get more lunch.”

“Oh, you can share mine, Sasuke-kun -”

“ _No._ ”

_Interlude: Kakashi and the Sandaime being nosy bastards and poking around Team Seven’s various homes._

“It’s a kitchen.”

“I’m told he likes it here.”

“In the _kitchen._ ”

“We all have our foibles, Kakashi. Besides, it’s a nice kitchen - he’s got a lovely view of the garden.”

“The lock on this door says _Mitsuo’s porn stash, Himiko get your own._ ”

“I believe he’s been finding seals around the compound and copying them. A very Uchiha trait, to use something without understanding precisely what it does - perhaps a valuable lesson to learn from his sensei?”

“Lucky sensei. I’ll send them a gift basket. Are these - these are ANBU gloves. He’s made arm protectors out of ANBU gloves. Are these _Itachi’s?_ ”

“Hm. Sasuke-kun has shown a remarkable resistance to letting go of the past. Uchiha and their obsessions… I would hate for such a promising young student to be lost with his ghosts.”

“Someone should probably do something about that.”

“ _Kakashi._ ”

“Is that the time? I appear to be late for my hair appointment.”

I didn’t want to sit with my new team when we piled back into the classroom after lunch. Shikamaru and Ino had closed ranks around Chouji though, and even Shino was safely ensconced with Team Eight. Faced with a choice of Kiba’s crudeness and Hinata’s stuttering or Naruto’s pouting and Sakura’s fawning, I chose the option less likely to cause a fuss. I’d have to get used to Naruto and Sakura anyway, I reasoned. They were the two main characters. The heroes. They were good people.

“Did you find out why she likes me?” I muttered, sliding into the seat next to Naruto. He stuck his tongue out and pointedly ignored me.

Rude. It was an honest question. If I knew what I was doing that was so damn attractive I’d know how to stop.

“Listen up!” Iruka said from the front. “Your new senseis will be here to collect you. From there on you’ll be with them, following their schedule and training and doing missions when they say. You need to come to the Hokage tower tomorrow to register as a team and get your photo taken. Any questions, ask your senseis!”

What followed was the expected roll call, teams being collected one by one and filing out in threes until there were only the three of us left. Sakura sat on the edge of her seat, all but vibrating from tenseness and darting glances between me and Iruka every now and then. Naruto, though he hid it better, was also clearly battling nerves, shoulders hunched, face in his customary pout. Even Iruka started fidgeting, tapping his fingers on his desk and staring at the door with a moue of distaste.

I wondered if it was for show. He was a chunin; surely he could wait silently if he wanted to? Maybe he was used to being expressive because he worked with kids. Maybe he was just that open a person, and that’s why he spent more time in the village and not on missions.

Me, I settled myself as comfortably as I could on the chair, and dropped my head in my arms to doze. I’d thought about bringing a book, but the current one I was reading was a collection of love poetry from a field of lilies to the waxing moon - I don’t know, I found it, the pictures were pretty. I didn’t particularly want to bring it out in front of my team though.

So. Dozing. Verging dangerously close to napping, but managing to avoid it. Iruka left after about an hour, with much apologising and assurances that our sensei wouldn’t be too much longer (lies; he knew exactly who we’d been assigned to). Sakura tried to strike up a conversation when he’d gone, but I avoided that with the spectacular technique of not answering.

Another hour, and Naruto balanced a chalkboard eraser on the door frame.

“Naruto! Take it down, what if it falls on our sensei!”

“They’re a pretty shit sensei then if they fall for a trick like that!”

“Don’t swear!”

“The bastard swears all the time!”

Yes, the exclamation marks after every sentence are accurate. I know. I hate it too.

“Sasuke-kun, tell him not to prank sensei!”

“Oh hell no,” I baulked. “I’m not being the one in charge of this train wreck.”

“Yeah, yeah Sakura-chan, I’m going to be the hokage so I should -”

“Haruno can be,” I cut in. One day, Naruto would be a very competent and inspiring leader. That day was not this day. He was annoying enough as he was.

That did feel a tad too harsh to say though when both of them screeched to a dumbfounded silence and stared at me. I shifted uncomfortably in my seat and fished for a better explanation. “She’s the smartest in our year,” I settled for, waving an awkward hand in her direction. “Smart people make good decisions.”

“You… think I’m smart?” she asked in a small voice. I resisted the urge to frown and shrink away. Those looked like _feelings_.

“Hn,” I said, then flushed with mortification at the fact that I’d just hnned, and deliberately buried my face in my arms for concentrated dozing time. Thank kami I was too pale to flush properly. And the light was wrong. They hadn’t seen anything. Nope.

Although, it would actually explain a lot if canon-Sasuke’s trademark reticence and grunting was, in fact, supreme social awkwardness rather than arrogant superiority. I wasn’t an _exact_ copy of the guy but I had the same first seven years, so I wasn’t that far off.

I mean, I had his memories of his first seven years. Minus the baby memories, no one keeps those. I felt like I was him. Don’t get me wrong, I still remembered seeing him skip off into the big empty greyness beyond Itachi’s Tsukuyomi, but I also remembered _being_ him, Itachi’s baby brother in the flesh, and I still missed my Sasuke-mum as much as - if not _more_ than - my first mum.

Neither of them came close to my grandma though.

Sakura took a breath. “Naruto,” she said hesitantly, and I could feel her glancing my way for approval. I kept very still and ignored them both. “As the team leader, I think you should… not prank our sensei? So we, um, make a good impression?”

“Boring,” Naruto complained. “I still think it wouldn’t get them if they were any good.”

I wasn’t actually sure about that. Hadn’t Kakashi fallen for it? It was a _long_ time since I’d seen the anime - and I’d never read the manga - but certain things stuck in the mind. He could’ve been faking, but on the other hand the eraser was non-lethal, made no use of chakra or seals that could be detected, and even the smell of chalk wouldn’t register as anything unusual. It’s entirely possible that the trap hit that perfect sweet spot of being simple enough to go unnoticed while still being effective enough to do what it needed to.

If you laced the chalk with an odourless contact poison…

“There,” Naruto said. “I put it back. Happy?”

“Not really,” a new and surprisingly deep voice drawled. I tilted my head to the side so I could look. “My first impression… I don’t like you. Meet me on the roof.”

He vanished in a cloud of smoke before I could see more than a mass of grey hair and baggy clothes, but it was enough to confirm that that was, indeed, Hatake Kakashi. Sensei extraordinaire, future hokage, Sharingan no Kakashi, and possessing of even worse hair than I had.

Seriously. I’d like to say he’d never seen a hair brush in his life, but I used to have curly hair in my old life. I recognised the floofed up look of not enough conditioner and too many split ends. Frizz gone wild. That there needed a wide toothed comb and a hair mask stat, and if I had to guess at what it actually _got_ then I’d put my money on a dog brush and a complete lack of product.

“Should we go?” Sakura asked, twitching nervously towards the door. I raised an eyebrow when she looked at me for confirmation, and she shook herself. “I’m smart,” she mumbled. “Team captain.” Then, louder, “We should go.”

“C’mon, bastard! You’ll make us late!”

“It’s Kakashi,” I grumbled, levering myself out of my seat and joining them. “He likes late.”

“All right,” Kakashi said, when the three of us were sat cross legged on the roof. “Introductions. Go.”

Naruto and Sakura exchanged glances, then Naruto shrugged comically and folded his arms behind his head, squinting at Kakashi in suspicion. “Um,” Sakura started. “Introduce ourselves how, Sensei?”

“Likes, dislikes, hobbies, dreams,” he drawled. “That sort of thing. Blondie, you go first.”

“Hey hey, what about you, Sensei? We don’t even know your name!”

“Maa, that’s true, isn’t it,” Kakashi said, scratching at the mask over his chin. It looked weird in real life. Actually, it’d looked pretty weird when it was fictional as well, but in real life it was fitted tight over his nose and mouth as though it were made from a thick spandex. No creases, no sign of where it was tied, no air holes or breathing tubes - how the hell did it not bother him? It made me uncomfortably aware of my lungs just looking at it, I can’t imagine what it would be like to actually wear.

“I'm Hatake Kakashi. Things I like and things I hate… I don't feel like telling you that. My dreams for the future? Never really thought about it. As for my hobbies… I have lots of hobbies.”

He eye smiled. Beneath the mask, I could just make out the edges of his lips, and I can confirm that they didn’t move. It should have been creepy, but it was actually really impressive how happy he made his one eye look.

“What was that?” Naruto demanded, pointing aggressively. Sakura twitched at his lack of manners. “We didn’t learn anything except your name! That’s not how you introduce yourself!” He huffed, putting his hands on his hips - oh, at some point he’d leapt to a standing position. I wasn’t sure why, it was probably better for inspirational speeches. “I’m Uzumaki Naruto! I like instant ramen, and I really like the ramen Iruka-sensei got me at Ichiraku’s, but I hate the three minutes you have to wait after you pour the water in the ramen. My hobby is eating different kinds of ramen and comparing them, and my future dream is to be the greatest Hokage! Then the whole village will stop disrespecting me and start treating me like I'm somebody important, believe it!”

There was a pause after his enthusiastic shouting. I’d known, roughly, what he was going to say, but I honestly hadn’t been expecting that. That was… a lot of words. And volume. Did he really just come out and say it about the whole village disrespecting him? Wow. This was not a subtle person.

Which was odd, given that he wore neon orange and regularly evaded patrols while he was out pranking.

Kakashi tilted his head, the very picture of unconcerned boredom. Forget ninja techniques, I wanted this man to teach me his acting secrets. “Huh. Pinky, your turn.”

She blushed, but sat up straighter. “I’m Haruno Sakura. What I like is… I mean the person I like is…” She blushed harder, and, naturally, looked at me. I pictured myself as stone and tried not to react. Naruto glared. The whole thing was so damn _unfair_. “My hobby is… My dream for the future is…” Save me. That was a genuine squeal. Help.

“And,” Kakashi prompted when she trailed off into giggly fantasy land. I mean, her giggly fantasy land probably had a lot more in the way of weddings and holding hands than anything else, but still. _Still._ I was being objectified and I didn’t like it. “What do you hate?”

She opened her mouth, cut a sideways look at Naruto, and changed what she was about to say. “People who are disrespectful! And loud! And gross!”

“Yeah!” Naruto cheered, completely missing the point. “Bastard, do you!”

“I’m Uchiha Sasuke,” I said, then realised that oh shit, I’d actually have to do this introduction. What had canon-Sasuke said? Something about Itachi? Well that was out. Um. “I like shuriken. I dislike fish. My hobbies are…” Think, think, what did I do besides read poetry books and train, _think._ “Plants? And my dream is -” eyeballs! No, fuck “- to be tall.”

“To be tall,” Kakashi repeated.

I could, potentially, have chosen a better dream, but I’d said it now. “Hn.” It wasn’t even that untrue. Being tall meant surviving. Being tall also meant getting over the stupid bout of malnutrition I’d given myself in my first year looking after myself. It turns out that the diet of a twenty something girl with a pretty sedentary lifestyle is really not enough for a seven year old, chakra using, highly active proto-ninja with a lot of growing to do. I’d upped the calories _now_ , but I was still frustratingly short and twig-like.

I was pretty sure canon-Sasuke was taller than Naruto though. I had faith in my genes. I’d get there.

“Well, now we all know each other,” Kakashi said, and eye smiled insincerely at us again.

“We get to go on missions! Sensei, Sensei what’s our first mission? Are we saving a princess, finding some long lost treasure, do we fight bandits -”

“Do you ever shut up?” I grumbled under my breath. There are fics - _many_ fics - where Naruto is surprisingly mature, or where the self inserted character says something profoundly wise and everyone gets along and it’s all lovely and grown up and everyone is sensible and it’s all _grand._ Why, please, was this not one of those fics.

“Think of it as a survival mission,” Kakashi started explaining ominously, and I tuned him out. Bell test, don’t eat, two thirds failure rate, yadda yadda. Unless he’d changed something - which I doubted, I was pretty sure I’d matched canon so far - I already knew the drill.

But should _I_ change something? Things would be different, just because I couldn’t remember how they were meant to go. Not to mention the whole problem of Orochimaru and canon-Sasuke’s merry jaunt around the continent being a missing nin. I had no plans to do any of that. But… what _did_ I have plans to do? I’d made it to the start of canon; that had been my biggest worry so far. Now that I was here, I had a plot - and with it, some plot armour. I knew that Danzo wouldn’t make a move on me, I knew that no one was going to try to take my sharingan except for Orochimaru. If they had done, it would’ve been in the story.

“Training ground three,” Kakashi said. “Five tomorrow morning. Don’t eat breakfast beforehand - you’ll just throw it up.” He cackled in a way that I distractedly decided I’d learn how to copy, and disappeared in a puff of smoke.

Should I try to solve the big problems before they became big problems? Akatsuki, mainly. Gaara, he was a major plotline. Obito. The fact that everyone still thought Itachi was bad when he wasn’t. But realistically, I was a piddly little nothing-person. I had a kekkei genkai I couldn’t use, a good grasp of the academy basics, and some vague foreknowledge that I had no way of explaining how I’d got. I’d be better off supporting Naruto and Sakura and waiting for them to fix it like they did in the original.

So… team? I should focus on making Team Seven as strong together as we could be?

“Um,” Sakura said, looking between the two of us. “Should we… Would you like to have a team dinner, Sasuke-kun? We can go to Yakiniku if you don’t like fish.”

I made a face. Barbeque and I, we were not best friends. “I like fish. Just not when they’re alive.”

“We could have ramen!”

“Or there’s sushi, if you prefer?”

They both turned to me and I sat back reflexively. “I have food at home,” I said before I’d thought through the answer. Because, you know, I’d literally just decided that my goal should be strengthening the team, so the first thing I did was refuse an option to strengthen the team. Sakura’s face fell. “Sorry,” I blurted. “See you tomorrow.”

And then I most definitely did not run away. I sauntered. Casually. Completely in control of myself and my life. Behind me, I heard Naruto offering to take Sakura to Ichiraku’s anyway and introduce her to old man Teuchi, quickly followed by Sakura turning him down.

Great, now I felt like a dick as well as an idiot. I sauntered faster.

“Plushie-tan,” I said, letting myself in the kitchen door and kicking my sandals off haphazardly, “I hate this. I can’t do this. How am I supposed to - they’re twelve! And annoying! And they keep having feelings everywhere, what do I do with that?” I pulled open the drawer harder than I meant to and grabbed the first pair of socks that fell out. It was fine. The sideboard was probably a few hundred years old and priceless, no one cared if it had a broken drawer.

“I can’t be responsible for other people,” I complained, roughly pulling off my old socks and replacing them with clean ones. Ninja sandals, while very practical, were very open at the toe. I’m not walking all that outside into my kitchen and over where I sleep, no sir. Yuck. “Why can’t they manage with just the two of them like they did before?”

I froze. Actually, that was a fair point. Why couldn’t they? With the added bonus of not spending so much time worrying about hunting me down as they had done for canon-Sasuke. It was perfect. The world would get saved, I wouldn’t be caught up in it and risk dying in the process, Sakura would start crushing on someone sensible, and Naruto wouldn’t be so hung up on a best friend rival that literally tried to kill him multiple times over.

And I would… Could I take a desk job? No, probably not. We’d be back to Danzo and his views on the sharingan bloodline going to waste. As unfairly pretty as the Uchiha genes were, I wasn’t built to be a mother. Father.

Fucking gender bullshit.

No, my best protection was still to become as strong as it was humanly possible to be so that I could keep people away from my eyes without relying on anyone else to do it for me. If I couldn’t trust the village to keep me safe - it hadn’t kept any of my family safe, and it did a shit job of keeping other people out of danger either - then who could I trust? Who was the one person who would always put me first and bring the wrath of Amaterasu down on anyone trying to de-sharingan me?

Oh.

“Aniki,” I whispered, looking at the weasel plushie on my bed. I felt behind me for my stool and leant back onto it with wide eyes.

It was just… so obvious.

Itachi was loyal to Konoha. That meant, it had to mean, that what he was doing in Akatsuki - that he was in some way helping Naruto. Was he a spy? Probably. Maybe he sabotaged things. If I joined him, if I _helped_ him, then that would be me supporting the plot, right? Plus, he was ridiculously strong. He’d been an ANBU captain when he was eleven! Twelve. Twelve? He’d never actually told me that he got promoted, I knew about his ANBU role from the things I’d found in his room and from canon foreknowledge. The same foreknowledge told me he was stronger than Kakashi, had a better grasp of using the sharingan, _and_ was going to die at some point - I couldn’t remember how, I just knew he didn’t make it to the end.

So: clearly I had to save him. No one else would. And while I was doing so, I could help him save Konoha, and by extension Naruto and the world, and he could save _me_ from Orochimaru and Danzo and every other creepy old man that wanted a piece of me.

I didn’t actually know for sure if Danzo did or not, but he clearly had a thing for eyes, so. Better safe than sorry.

“Ok,” I said, nodding to myself. “Ok. Plushie-tan, we have a plan.” Itachi appeared… after the chunin exams. Naruto pulled on the kyuubi’s power to defeat Gaara, rumours started, Itachi and Kisame came to check them out. Kakashi got sharinganed, Naruto almost got kidnapped until Itachi stalled enough for Jiraiya to save him, Sasuke and Itachi had their first major showdown of the anime. I couldn’t have asked for a better set up.

All I had to do was survive on Team Seven until then, getting in as much training and growing as strong as possible so I wouldn’t be a burden on Itachi when I defected from Konoha and joined him. It was perfect. Flawless. Genius plan. _Yes._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Shh, nobody tell Sasuke how Itachi actually died in canon. Also I should point out that we're not so much dealing with an unreliable narrator as an idiot narrator, so um. If something in the internal monologue looks screwy it probably is, and if you suspect it will come back later to bite everyone involved in their respective asses then it probably will.


	4. Chapter 4

I did not, in the end, have breakfast before the bell test. It hurt to skip it, a soul deep wound down to my very core, but I was still paranoid about knowing things I shouldn’t be able to know. If anyone checked whether or not I’d followed my sensei’s instructions - not that I thought they would, but _if_ they did, then I had no plausible reason to have ignored them and eaten anything.

I waved a mournful goodbye to my fruit bowl and hopped over the fence at ridiculous o’clock in the morning. At some point I should probably get around to putting a gate between the kitchen door and the street, but on the other hand I was used to the fence now and couldn’t be asked, so. Myeh. Some point.

What I was not used to was the pre-dawn cold. I was Uchiha. We were fire people. We liked the sun. My outfit consisted of a shirt, a pair of three-quarter length trousers, _sandals,_ and arm guards that were more there for the flame resistance than for warmth.

I was suffering, and I hated it.

“Good morning, Sasuke-kun!” Sakura chirped, looking far too cheerful and unaffected by the cold despite wearing even less on her arms than me. I decided I hated her too. And Naruto, in his cosy warm jumpsuit jacket. How dare he.

I made a vague sound of acknowledgement that didn’t even try to be a hello, and decided to redo my morning stretches. If I was lucky, I’d snap a tendon in the subarctic temperature and be whisked off to hospital where I could have a blanket and a minimum of four breakfasts. Shit, forget a tendon; I’d give my entire right foot for coffee. You know how long it’s been since I had coffee? Five years. You know how long it’s been since I died and got roped into being Sasuke? Five years.

Itachi, you have a lot to answer for. I still love you and I’m still going to help you overthrow Akatsuki from the inside, but. _Coffee._

“What kind of weird work out is that?” Naruto asked. I couldn’t see his face from my upside down position, but I could hear the squint.

“The one I do when it’s too early and too cold and Sensei’s a dick who’s going to make us wait four hours before bothering to show up.” It wasn’t even weird, just an all-over flexibility routine that anyone familiar with the academy basic would recognise. They were so similar that clan history claimed the academy basic was developed by one of our kunoichis, and donated to the village as a sign of her devotion to the Senju’s dream.

Clan history also claimed that the Senju shamelessly spied on the kunoichi while she was training and the academy basic was straight up theft. Given what our bloodline’s famous for, I’m not sure we had much leeway for getting pissy about that, but. Old wounds.

I frowned though, because origins aside, the routine I was doing was an extended version of _academy_ basic. Naruto should know it. His education was messed up, sure, but stretching was first steps. Had he seriously not been taught it?

“Stop bothering Sasuke-kun!” Sakura snapped, followed by a crash and a yelp as Naruto’s head met her fist and then the floor. I didn’t wince. A muscle in my jaw may have twitched from how hard I was not wincing. Kami, I was on a team with a psychopath. “It’s not his fault that you’re such an idiot. He’s just being super prepared for the test, right Sasuke-kun?”

 _Go away,_ I thought, and skipped the next stretch in favour of staying upside down where I didn’t have to look at them.

“That’s cheating!” Naruto complained, and I gave up, collapsing into a forward roll just so I could look at him in exasperation.

“In what universe is it cheating to be prepared?” I asked.

“Ninja life is unpredictable! You have to be good at being surprised instead of being ready for things or else you aren’t being a real ninja!”

I stared. Sakura stared. Naruto crossed his arms and glared at us, jaw set stubbornly forward, and refused to back down.

“What the fuck,” I said.

“That’s not how it goes,” Sakura agreed.

Naruto glared harder. “It is,” he insisted.

“Ninja life is unpredictable,” Sakura recited, her voice falling into the familiar sing-song of a learned saying. Because it _was_ a learned saying, one we’d all picked up so early that I couldn’t even tell you where from. Where did you first hear that a stitch in time saves nine? Impossible to say. Unless you first heard it here, in which case there you go, free saying from me. “So be ready for anything and be ready for surprises, because a ninja is never unprepared.”

“That’s… not…” His voice trailed off in a way that, knowing what he was probably thinking, was pitifully sad to listen to. “What I learnt?”

“Well, relearn,” I said flatly. Epiphanies about how screwed up the academy’s treatment of him was could happen on his own time. Not that I didn’t care, but I had no idea what to say or do about it, and I knew he’d be fine without my intervention. Ish. Fine-ish. Eventually. “We’re not at the academy any more, a lot of things are going to be different.”

“Fine,” he bit out, his hurt morphing quickly - at least on the surface - back to belligerent anger. “If you know everything, then what’s the test going to be?”

“How the hell should I know -”

“Then what are you preparing for, bastard -”

“I was stretching! Because it’s cold!”

“Oh, it’s _cold?_ Sorry Hime-chan, let me just get your coat for you -”

“Will you both shut up!” Sakura finally exploded. She eeped, flushing bright red when we both stared at her in shock, and flapped her hands at me in apology. “Sorry! Sorry, Sasuke-kun, it’s just, um. We’re meant to be a team, aren’t we? And it’s best if teams don’t fight?”

Naruto opened his mouth, probably to shout a violent agreement or more violent denial, but snapped it shut again as Sakura brandished a fist at him.

I took a breath and tried to squash my crabbiness. Paranoia could go fuck itself. Next time I was having breakfast, Kakashi be damned. “Haruno’s right,” I said, when I could finally trust myself not to growl it. Adulting and maturity right there, that’s what that was. “We’re a team.”

“We’re a sucky team -”

“Naruto! Language!”

“Did you _hear_ what the bastard’s been saying all morning?”

“And,” I continued, raising my voice over the byplay. “Haruno’s our team leader. So. We should do what she says.”

They blinked owlishly at me. I resisted the urge to fidget. _Adult._ Also, this was the whole point of establishing yesterday that they shouldn’t look to me to make decisions. I made crappy decisions that ended up with Naruto shouting at me.

“I’m the team leader,” Sakura repeated, shaking her head. “Ok. Um. We should, um.” She glanced around nervously. “We should… all be prepared. Like Sasuke-kun. With, um. Stretches.”

“How are stretches meant to prepare us for anything?” Naruto asked. Sakura bristled, but it seemed like an honest question, so I answered.

“They stop you injuring yourself when you’re training.”

“Huh. Ok, then, if Sakura-chan says stretches, I can stretch.” He sketched her a sloppy salute that had her standing straighter, even if she pretended to be annoyed.

“Great,” I said, and turned myself upside down again just in time to tune out Sakura’s scolding as Naruto completely butchered the first position.

This team was a _mess._

By the time Kakashi finally deigned to show up, my stomach was digesting itself, lack of calories had given me hypothermia, and I was ready to commit murder. I glowered my way through his explanation of the rules.

“Remember,” he finished off with, “Whoever doesn’t get a bell goes back to the academy - or fails out of being a ninja all together.” He shook the two bells with a happy little jingle of sadism and torment and clipped them to his belt. “You’ll have to come at me with intent to kill to even have a chance. Begin!”

 _Intent_ to kill. Boy, give me an opening and I’ll choke you with your own hair. In one long silver string I wound three times his little throat around… 

“This is bullshit!” Naruto exploded.

“ _Naruto!_ ”

“What’s the point of putting us in teams if they’re just gonna split us up, huh? It’s stupid!”

“It… He’s still going to pass two of us,” Sakura said. “Maybe he’s just making sure he gets the stronger two?” Her shoulders slumped and she looked between us, clearly already marking herself out as weakest.

Which was idiotic. Naruto was the dead last; based on what she’d seen of him so far, she should be writing him off as a lost cause. He wasn’t, we know that, but Sakura had seen nothing to make her think that Naruto was better than a beached jellyfish, and she _still_ ranked herself lower than him.

Worse was that Naruto was doing the exact same thing, glaring between me and Sakura with his face scrunched in an unhappy pout as he decided that clearly, the two of us were going to pass and leave him behind.

All we needed now was for me to have a crisis of faith and decide that, as the heroes, those two should carry the torch for Team Seven and leave me to wither away and die by myself, and we’d have a full set of insecurities and angst. God, how was _I_ the one representing the team’s optimism and good cheer?

“ _If_ we get the bells,” I said. “Which we probably won’t, because he’s a jounin and we aren’t yet genin. He’s too strong for any one of us.” So therefore we should…

“Oh,” Sakura said, slumping further. “If you think so, Sasuke-kun.”

Kami save me.

“Then I’ll be the first not-genin to be hokage!” Naruto declared, shifting himself with no warning to inspirational speech pose number four, complete with raised fist and determined expression. “And no dick-sensei’s going to stop me!”

I choked. So did Sakura. “ _You can’t call him dick-sensei!_ ” she shrieked, loud enough that Kakashi, across the field and reading his orange porn book, could not fail to hear.

I mean, he was probably listening anyway, but come on. Can we at least have a pretense at being sneaky stealth ninjas, please.

“If we’re doing this we’re best off working as a team,” I said, cutting the crap and just coming straight out with it. “Uzumaki, you’re good at traps, right? And Haruno, you’re the team leader. What do you want us to do?” I bit my tongue on mentioning Naruto’s clones. We hadn’t seen them yet, _technically_ I didn’t know for sure that he had them, and as far as I was concerned they were off limits until Naruto volunteered them.

“Um.” She swallowed, eyes wide and so out of focus that the only thing she could be looking at was the far side of Suna. It occured to me, for the first time, that she was twelve, inexperienced, and completely lacking in confidence. She also hadn’t actually asked to be the team leader at any point. “We should, um. Naruto should. Lay a trap? And then Sasuke can. Take the bells. From sensei. When he gets, um. Trapped.”

She gets over her issues by herself, I reminded myself. Ditching both of them as soon as Itachi swings by. Just. Just roll with it until then.

“That could work,” I lied. “Uzumaki, we’ll distract Kakashi while you make your trap then try and push him towards it. Where do you need him, and how long to set up?”

He squinted at the battlefield in concentration. “There,” he decided, pointing at the tree line. “And don’t worry about set up - I’ve got an awesome plan. It’ll be ready in time, believe it!”

“Ok. Haruno, you ready? We need the best way for two genin to approach a jounin. I’ve got shuriken and fire jutsu, both of us have the academy basic taijutsu and kunai, and we don’t need to incapacitate him, just to drive him back to the trees to spring the trap.”

The exam-question style phrasing seemed to settle her, and when she took a breath and answered her voice was steadier and less high pitched. “Distract and evade,” she said. “One of us should be close enough to stop him forming hand seals, the other should control the fight from a distance. Um, shuriken are long range weapons so if you take the distance, I can… do taijutsu?” She blanched. Her taijutsu was nowhere near strong enough to pull it off and she knew it, but the roles she’d assigned were technically the text-book correct answer.

“We’ll swap out part way,” I said. “It’ll throw him off.”

“All right, let’s go!” Naruto cheered - and disappeared in a puff of smoke. What. That was a clone? How was that a clone. _When_ was that a clone. _What._

“Shannaro!” Sakura yelled in response, nowhere near as mind-blown by the shadow clone as I thought she should be, and charged down the field towards Kakashi with her fist pulled back to strike.

“Jesus christ,” I muttered, and sprinted after her, already pulling a handful of shuriken out my thigh holster. “I’m on a team of lunatics.”

Kakashi didn’t even look up from his book, the bastard. He leaned casually to the side to dodge Sakura’s punch, then sat down on the floor to slide neatly under the high kick she followed it up with. I threw three shuriken in quick succession, swinging wide to get an angle that Sakura wasn’t blocking, and he knocked two of them away with his shoe when he crossed his legs then hunched his shoulders in a lecherous giggle and completely ignored the third as it sailed over his head.

Shit, this was getting nowhere. I couldn’t fireball because Sakura was too close, and we hadn’t budged him an _inch_ closer to Naruto. We needed to get him moving, somehow.

“Sasuke-kun, swap!” Sakura commanded, abandoning her ineffective taijutsu to fall back towards me. I grit my teeth; Kakashi was just playing with us, but if he got serious we wouldn’t stand a chance. If we were going to do anything idiotic it needed to be now.

“Catch!” I yelled, and flung myself at her. She squawked, hands flying up to block her face as I swung a kunai out, but I was focussed more on the Icha Icha book Kakashi was giggling over. Kawarimi worked best with something the same size and shape but it _was_ my favourite jutsu for a reason, and that was that with the right timing and surprise -

 _Now,_ I thought, and switched places with the book just before I would’ve slammed into Sakura. I heard her shriek and fumble with it but I didn’t stop to see if she caught it, all my attention on twisting out of Kakashi’s hold and trying to stab the kunai somewhere painful. He blocked it, but I was already moving, foot aimed at his ear - he dodged - kunai again, slicing to his kneecap - block - elbow aimed at his -

His palm slammed into my ribcage, sending me flying with my breath hissing out in a painful wheeze.

“Points for intent to kill,” he said mildly as I struggled to stand. “But you seem to have forgotten the bells, Sasuke-kun. Whatever could I have done to upset you so much?”

I hacked a cough in response, staggering to my feet. Sakura was running towards Naruto, Icha Icha clutched tight to her chest, and Kakashi heaved an annoyed and put upon sigh. “Maa, I suppose I shouldn’t leave that with a young and impressionable lady. What would her mother say if she knew what you’d been giving her, hm?”

Oh, that was too rich. “She’s the one who keeps perving on me!” He started trotting lazily after her, and I reached down for a shuriken to throw -

Bastard. My shuriken pouch.

“Missing something, Sasuke?” He was twirling it round his finger. _Bastard._

Taijutsu wouldn’t work. The hand signs for the fireball jutsu took too long - I wasn’t fast enough yet to use it without a few more seconds than I had. I had no weapons, and I wouldn’t trick him with kawarimi twice.

Fleeing it was. Icha Icha was the priority, Sakura would be the distraction, and speed was one thing I had. “Haruno!” I yelled, catching her attention as I ran up the outside of her and angled towards where Naruto was waiting. She stared at me with wide, panicked eyes, full out sprinting as Kakashi lazily loped after her. “Throw!” I demanded.

In retrospect, I should probably have expected the force with which the book came flying directly at my head. I snatched it out the air and increased my pace, heading straight for -

“You seem to have forgotten the bells again, Sasuke-kun,” Kakashi said, voice echoing from the darkness around me. I slowed to a gentle jog, not wanting to risk my ankles on ground I couldn’t see.

“Ninja art: Genjutsu,” Kakashi continued, disembodied and ominous. I scowled and stopped running, dropping instead into a defensive stance. We hadn’t covered genjutsu much at the academy, not beyond the foundational theory of it. I hadn’t been in one since Itachi’s Tsukuyomi. “If you can’t keep your head on the mission, who knows where you’ll end up?”

“I knew what I was doing,” I said. Everything was still black; I was tempted to close my eyes so I could hear better, but I knew that wouldn’t help. If anything did appear, I needed to be able to see.

“Did you? Do you know what you’re doing now?”

Waiting. There had to be a point to the genjutsu. It was auditory and visual, but I could still smell the forest and feel the ground - if he hadn’t covered touch then I’d feel if he tried to take the book.

“Perhaps you need some encouragement.” I blinked, and Kakashi was standing in front of me, book in his hand - no! That had to be a trick, I was still holding it. He locked eyes with me and raised his hands in a hand seal as I frantically tried to check if the book I had was real or not. “Demonic illusion: Hell viewing technique.”

I froze. Kakashi dissolved, breaking up into ripples. The dark got colder. It pressed on my chest, and my breath stuck in my lungs.

What was he - no, he couldn’t - I was the last Uchiha, I hadn’t activated my sharingan, they wouldn’t kill me yet -

The water flooded over my nose, stinging my eyes until I screwed them shut. It’s not real, it wasn’t real, just an _illusion_ but I could feel it, the genjutsu wasn’t meant to cover touch, how could I feel the water, it wasn’t there I just needed to breathe -

“Kai,” I gasped, finally remembering how to break a genjutsu. The word came out breathless, stolen in a bubble of air, my last air there wasn’t any more just water water water -

I slammed the corner of the book into the side of my head hard enough to see stars and practically sobbed in relief as the pain made the cold dark wet vanish. Konoha’s training grounds were _beautiful._ Look at those trees. Trees! Gorgeous plants of perfection, full of that sweet sweet oxygen that I was never going to stop breathing again.

“Well that was disappointing,” Kakashi said. “I thought you were meant to be the rookie of the year? The dead last gave a better showing than that.”

I glared, still gulping down huge breaths of air. Naruto had evidently sprung his trap; there were kunai everywhere, and at least five of him that I could see in various states of tied up and hung from the branches. It was impossible to tell which was the real one - maybe none of them were. Kakashi had Sakura in front of him in a choke hold, not tight enough to hurt her but one that she wasn’t escaping from without help.

“You’re an asshole,” I managed. I didn’t even have Icha Icha, he’d replaced it with a rock. One that was suspiciously red from where I’d used it to brain myself. Great.

“Oh,” he pouted. “And here I was about to offer you a deal. These two almost got the bells, but your taijutsu was better. So! I’ll give you one of their bells instead.” He blinked, completely ignoring Naruto’s five-fold strangled protest. “Who would you like on your team, Sasuke-kun, and who are you going to send back to the academy?”

“Asshole,” I repeated. I didn’t believe him for a second, but I _did_ believe that if he didn’t like my answer he’d fail us all just because he could. I glared, thinking furiously. I had to show that we were a team. Why had he singled me out as the weak link? I was the one trying to push the others into the damn team in the first place! Was that it, did he think I’d seen through the trick and was cheating? Maybe. I’d ignored the bells, and we’d never actually decided among the three of us what we’d do with them if we got them. All we’d said was that we’d need to work together to have a chance.

“Tick tock, Sasuke. Pick a team mate.”

Fuck it. “No,” I said.

“Oh? Then I guess both of them are failing, if you don’t want either of them with you.”

“No, damnit. They got the bells. They pass.” Please let that be the right answer. If I got tied to the log without lunch I would _eviscerate_ someone.

Kakashi hummed. “That sounds like you going back to the academy then. What a turnout for the rookie of the year.”

“Get on with it!” I snapped. “They make a good team. If you want me as well, pass all of us. Otherwise send me back and stop wasting time.”

He hummed again, drawn out and slow, and tapped his chin in mock thought. I clenched my hand into a fist around my bloody rock and fought the urge to scream. “Well,” he finally drawled. “I guess we’ll need to work on that temper of yours, Sasuke-kun. Ah, that’s a problem for future me. Lucky him.” He let go of Sakura and stepped back, hands innocently behind his back and eye in that damned smiley u-shape again. Naruto yelped, and four of him - as well as several of the kunai - disappeared in bunshin-smoke as the fifth dropped out of the tree in an untidy sprawl.

“Wait wait, is that it? Do we pass?” he asked, pushing himself up his knees.

“You pass!” Kakashi cheered. “Congratulations my cute little genin! Look, I even made celebratory bentos for you. I only made two though, because there were only supposed to be two of you… Oh, Sasuke won’t mind if I give them to you two. You got the bells and he got stuck in a genjutsu after all, it’s only fair!”

He handed the bentos over, patted a shell-shocked Sakura on the head, and flopped down on the ground with his own bento appearing apparently from thin air. I stared. My stomach growled. Naruto looked between me and Sakura with a vaguely confused expression.

“Sensei,” I said in an even, flat tone. “I despise you.”

“Ah, you say the most adorable things,” he cooed.

That’s it. I have a better dream. My life long ambition is no longer to be tall; it’s to make this man’s life hell. He will rue the day he met me, the sadistic motherfucker. _Rue._


	5. Chapter 5

D-ranks.

You knew they were coming. I knew they were coming. Sakura knew they were coming. Naruto flails through life being in turn surprised and outraged by everything he finds, and I’m pretty sure that even he knew they were coming.

But did you know that an anime montage to connect the graduation arc to the wave mission arc _completely failed to capture_ the sheer _number_ of d-rank missions Team Seven actually did? I thought it was only meant to be a few days, a week tops, and then Tayuma or Itsusa or Tsazuna or _whatever_ the drunk bridge building maniac was called would wander in and insult us and the plot would start picking up in earnest. Easy. Simple. Efficient.

_Lies._

We’d graduated at the end of March. It was now well into mid April, and we were _still_ doing d-ranks. And you know the worst part? In another situation, I would’ve actually liked d-ranks. I wouldn’t mind doing them. Gardening, home maintenance, running errands - these were exactly the sort of mindless little tasks that kept my hands busy while my thoughts wandered. If I were at home, I’d be humming, or amusing myself by trying to do everything in a handstand, or explaining to Plushie-tan why the lack of commercially available bleach in Konoha was a crime against humanity and surely no one civilised would stand for it.

I get that synthetically produced chemicals are hard, but come on. I’m reduced to scrubbing the bins out with washing up gloves and bars of soap. It’s _barbaric._

But painting a fence on a nice spring day? Yes. Delightful. Peaceful. Calming. Meditation grade zen, even.

“ _Naruto!_ ”

Except for one tiny thing.

“What? He wanted the fence painted, I painted the fence!”

“Maa, done already? That was fast.”

“No one’s faster than the Naruto clone army, believe it!”

“It doesn’t matter how fast you are, idiot! You did it wrong!”

“But Sakura-chan -!”

I put my paintbrush down across the lip of the paint tin, and levelled Kakashi with the most unimpressed look I could muster. He gave me a cheery wave from his position in the trees, not even bothering to look up from his book.

“Sounds like your team could use your help, Sasuke,” he chirped. “I think Sakura’s going to give Naruto a concussion.”

“Haruno’s the team leader,” I deadpanned. “If she wants to put Uzumaki in hospital, she can.”

“I heard that, bastard!”

Kakashi nodded in solemn agreement. “So cold, my cute little genin. Who hurt you, hm? Weren’t you listening to my inspirational speech by the memorial stone?”

I looked at him suspiciously. Kakashi was impossible to read; I could never tell if he was actually fishing for information, or if he was just messing around. _I_ knew that I was a flight risk and actively trying to keep my distance with the other members of the team because I was going to abandon them and follow my s-rank missing nin brother into his life of crime as a member of a terrorist organisation set on ending the world, but Kakashi didn’t. I hoped. Did he? He was one of the most powerful characters in the entire series. He was also squirrelly as fuck. Who knew what he knew?

“I’m not putting the mission above my teammates,” I said. “He has a healing factor. He’ll be fine.”

“ _So cold._ ”

I frowned, but didn’t bother to ask why Kakashi didn’t step in himself if he was so worried. I’d learnt early on that his hands-off approach extended to pretty much every area of teaching. He was more like a babysitter than a sensei. Not even a babysitter. Vaguely concerned bystander. He accidentally happened to be in the same vicinity. Sometimes.

“No more clones!” Sakura yelled, dispatching the last of them with a sharp blow to the head that left the real Naruto reeling in pain as the memory hit him. “Do it right or don’t do it at all!”

My zen, I thought mournfully. We didn’t even have any cold tea. The man who’d hired us had a tray of it in his kitchen, I could see it through the window, but as soon as he’d seen Naruto he’d scarpered inside and made no attempt to offer it to us.

“Here,” I said, handing Naruto a scraper and a block of sandpaper. “You need to take the old paint off before you put the new paint on.”

“I don’t need your help, bastard,” he growled, nursing his headache and glaring. Sakura raised her fist again in warning. “Fine! I’ll take the stupid old paint off. I don’t see _why_ we have to do that. It doesn’t say we have to in the mission briefing.”

“Because I’m the team leader and I say you do what Sasuke-kun tells you, _that’s_ why,” Sakura snarled, hands on her hips and her own scraper held like a kunai in her fist. Whatever reservations she’d had about giving orders at the bell test, they’d melted away in the fact of Kakashi’s - and my - tacit approval of her being in charge. Not that she’d give _me_ any orders still, not without a lot of stuttering and umming and general purpose blushing, but Naruto? She could boss him around like a pro.

Naruto bristled, ready to defend himself, and I practically shoved the tools in his hands to cut him off. “If you leave the old paint it’ll flake off, and then there’ll be holes in the new paint and it won’t look good. Also the client will be pissed that we rushed and did a sloppy job.” I retreated before he could reply and sat firmly cross legged by my own - beautifully sanded - piece of fence.

Paint brush. Paint. Even, measured strokes. _Zen._

“You sure know a lot about fences, Sasuke-kun,” Kakashi said, appearing on my fence post. “I bet you know more painting tips than jutsus, even. You could be a decorator!”

My eye twitched. “You could teach us a jutsu. Because you’re a _teacher._ ”

“Hm.” He tapped his chin and tilted his head back to look up at the cloudless blue sky. “Sorry, not today. It’s the wrong phase of the moon for jutsu teaching. Best stick to fences for now, ne?”

The shuriken I aimed at his eye was entirely justified. The fact that he’d apparently used a water clone instead of a shadow clone and the burst of water wrecked the painting I’d already done was fucking rude and uncalled for.

I grit my teeth and fired up my old friend the immolation jutsu to dry myself out. It was my new defence against the fact that Kakashi demanded we meet before dawn each day - despite never turning up himself until the sun was high in the sky. Turns out that using chakra to set yourself on fire is an _excellent_ way to keep warm, so long as you stop before any actual flames appear.

“Ah ah, Sasuke, no slacking!”

And so long as you weren’t interrupted while you were building the chakra by your idiot of a sensei throwing a kunai at you.

“ _Hate,_ ” I hissed, and shamelessly stole the kunai.

Four hours, three d-ranks, and two more unnecessary soakings later - one of which happened because Naruto over-balanced while we were draining a flooded river bank and _dragged me in it_ \- and we were finally, _finally_ done for the day.

“Look at that, my precious ducklings! Just time for one more -”

“ _No,_ ” I snarled. “It’s almost dinner, you didn’t let us stop for lunch, I am getting _clean_ and then I’m _eating_ or so help me there will be _hell._ ”

Sakura and Naruto didn’t say anything themselves, but by the way they closed ranks beside me in exhausted agreement I knew they felt the same.

Kakashi eye smiled and ruffled my hair. He’s damn lucky I didn’t bite his fingers off. “Maa, you’re so grumpy when you’re hungry. Like a puppy!”

Behind me, Sakura choked. Even Naruto stifled a snort. I glared at Kakashi, and if there weren’t so many eyeball thieves in the world I swear I’d’ve activated my sharingan then just to fully express how much I despised him.

“Well,” he allowed, prudently removing his hand from my head. “As a responsible adult I can’t possibly inflict you on clients in this state. Did you know, Sasuke-kun, you’re all covered in river mud? See you tomorrow, usual time!”

He waved, and poofed out like the coward he was. I think this one was a shunshin. I’m getting better at telling the difference between them and clones - mainly because Naruto uses so many clones. 

“Aw man!” Naruto complained. “He’s gone again! We didn’t get to do any training today either.”

“We never get to do training with him,” I pointed out. “Because he’s shit.”

Naruto pointed at me and looked expectantly at Sakura. She flushed, but dutifully said, “Um, Sasuke-kun, maybe we shouldn’t be so, um, disrespectful of Sensei?”

“Yeah, bastard! Language!”

I rolled my eyes to hide my surprise. Sakura, telling Sasuke that he was doing something wrong? This was character development at its finest. I didn’t know whether to be proud of her for it or annoyed that I was being called out for swearing by someone less than half my age, and settled for awkwardly glossing over it.

“We can always train by ourselves. We don’t need him for sparring or taijutsu practice.”

“Together?” Naruto asked, scrunching up his nose. “As in, all three of us, at the same time?”

“Unless you have another team,” I huffed, stung. I thought Naruto was meant to be desperate for friends?

“That’s a great idea, Sasuke-kun!” Sakura gushed. “We can use the mornings, before Sensei arrives. Oh, that’s probably what he meant us to do in the first place - Sasuke-kun is so clever for seeing underneath the underneath!”

“Yeah, and it’ll be way less boring than all those stretches, believe it!”

I stuck my tongue out at him. Yes, I was filling the empty hours of the morning with more flexibility training. Yes, I was doing it to stop them talking to me. And yes, it was still freezing cold at the asscrack of dawn, and I needed to keep moving to stop my bones calcifying into ice. It wasn’t my fault the other two insisted on watching instead of joining in.

“We should do something,” Sakura said, standing up straighter with a disturbingly determined expression. “Something as a team. Ino-pig said Team Ten go out to Yakiniki’s after training and I think Team Eight’s sensei took them to the tea shop. We need a Team Seven thing!”

“Ramen!” Naruto immediately volunteered. He grabbed my elbow as the closest person and started tugging me down the street. I planted my heels and refused to move.

“ _Clean,_ ” I countered.

“We could go to the onsen?” Sakura suggested, with just enough casual mildness that it was obviously not casual in the slightest. Also, the blush. And the way she kept looking at me and flicking her gaze away while biting her lip invitingly.

The fuck do they teach in kunoichi classes. _I_ wasn’t a raging hornball when I was a twelve year old girl. I think I’d just discovered nail polish and training bras. Also pokemon. The trading cards were banned at school because people kept stealing them from each other, so we colonised the chess club and used that as a front for our illegal black market dealings.

I was a cool kid, ok.

I was also far too sensible to venture _willingly_ into a body of water deep enough to cover my head. Admittedly, you’d have to sit really _really_ slouched, but the heat could easily make you light headed and then you’d fall asleep and slowly slide down until you never came up again and then what would you do with yourself. Look like an idiot for going in the water, that’s what.

“I have a bath at home,” I said. She looked crestfallen, and I’m weak, so I relented: “We could have dinner later, though. Team dinner. As a team. Not a date. Uzumaki has to be there.”

“Team dinner at six!” Naruto all but shouted, pointing at both of us. “Don’t be late like Sensei!”

“We’ll meet in the town square,” Sakura agreed, recovering far too quickly from the disappointment of not going to the onsen. “See you there!”

“I think I got played,” I admitted to Plushie-tan once I was home, showered (I _had_ a bath, somewhere - I think next to my parent’s room? - but that didn’t mean I had to subject myself to it), and wrapped in a plain navy yukata while my hair dried. “I thought she was meant to be straightforward. She yells _shannaro_ and charges at people. How did I let myself be talked into this?”

Plushie-tan stared wisely back with his shiny button eyes and didn’t answer.

“That’s fine for you to say. You don’t have to put clothes on again.” I poked at the soggy pile of black I’d been wearing earlier and made a face. Straight in the washing machine with those. Thank god laundry detergent was widely available, even if bleach wasn’t.

I swear, one day I was going to work out the rules of why some things did and didn’t exist. _One day._

Pulling open the sideboard door and staring at my neatly folded stack of more black was spectacularly uninspiring. “I don’t wanna wear clothes,” I whined. “I like pyjamas. I’ve had a hard day. I want pyjamas, and sappy poems, and bed. Maybe ice cream.”

I pouted. It wasn’t even like I could put casual clothes on instead of my shinobi gear. I didn’t _have_ casual clothes. Because _Itachi_ didn’t have casual clothes, the over achieving nut. Why couldn’t he predict that one day I’d live entirely in his cast-offs and get some pretty things to balance out the serious?

“I bet he does have pretty things,” I muttered. “He’s just hiding them. He must’ve worn not-work clothes for something.” Didn’t the clan parties mandate formal wear? No, wait, what was I thinking. Formal wear meant heavy silk kimonos, I remembered being stuffed into them the few times my parents took me with them. That was precisely the opposite of what I was going for.

It did make me think though; Fugaku always used to wear a haori. At least, he did around the clan compound - I think he had a standard flak jacket shinobi outfit for when he was on duty, but I didn’t see him wearing it much. I didn’t have the full outfit to go under a haori, but it wasn’t like Naruto or Sakura would care, would they? I just… really didn’t want to put my training gear back on.

Hell, Naruto and Sakura probably wouldn’t care if I turned up in the yukata. It was only the clan elders who were still traditional enough to consider them home clothes only. Surely. I’d seen loads of people wear them in public. Right? Maybe.

“All right, house,” I muttered, pushing open the closed door to the main body of the house. “Haori me.”

The house answered with a cloud of dust, and, when I flicked the light on, a clear view of the missing tatami mats where Itachi stabbed our mum.

“The clan elders are dead, what do they know,” I said, tying an obi round my waist to hold the yukata shut. “I’m a child of the future, I can wear what I want. See you later, Plushie-tan.”

I regretted the yukata by the time I met up with the others. As warm and comfortable as it was round the house, it wasn’t thick enough to protect against the chill of the evening. Not that my normal shirt would have done much better, which was why I usually avoided the outside world after the sun went down, but on the other hand my normal shirt wouldn’t have got Naruto and Sakura sending me weird side-eyes the whole walk to the restaurant.

“Would you two stop that?” I hissed. “They’re just clothes!”

“But Sasuke-kun, I didn’t know you wore kimono!”

“It’s not a kimono. And I don’t. Except at home.”

“You feel comfortable enough to wear home clothes around us? Sasuke-kun!”

“Less comfortable by the second,” I muttered, turning away from her. That didn’t help much - Naruto was on my other side, squinting. “What?”

“You’re too pretty,” he said. “If you dress like a girl, people are going to think you’re a girl.”

“Men wear yukatas!”

“You still look like a girl,” Naruto repeated, chin raised in a stubborn tilt that said his mind wouldn’t be changed, then adjusted his position to glare at everyone passing by instead of at me.

I stuck my tongue out at the back of his head. Truthfully, I didn’t mind looking like a girl. It was actually… Nice. Maybe, once I’d left Konoha and I could stop being so paranoid of the village finding out about my previous life, I could capitalise on that. Itachi loved me, right? He’d still love me if I was a sister. Sometimes. It felt weird to think of myself as ever being fully _girl_ again, but it was comforting to have the option.

“Where are we going, anyway?” I asked. Sakura had vetoed ramen, and as much as Naruto pouted he’d bowed to the inevitable and let her lead the way.

“Sushi!” she said. “You said you liked fish, and there’s a sushi place just round the corner that’s really good.”

“Ah,” Naruto faltered. “Old lady Emiyo’s sushi place?”

“Yes!” She seemed to pick up on his hesitance, and offered, “I think they have some other dishes, if you don’t like sushi?”

“No, I like sushi. Um, do they have tables outside? I could hold the table while you two order?”

I made a strangled sound of protest. “Do you people just not feel the cold or something? Inside. With the heat. Like normal human beings.”

We reached the restaurant then and Sakura pushed open the doors to go in. Naruto tried to tuck himself in behind me, but given that he was at least an inch taller and his hair was fluorescent yellow, he wasn’t that successful.

“Table for three please, Obaasan!” Sakura said, all cheerfulness and polite bows.

“Sakura-chan!” The old lady greeted. “And you’re a genin now, I see! This must be your - team.” Her kind smile froze as she glanced over at us. My eyes narrowed. She seemed to debate with herself for a second, then turned back to Sakura with a regretful expression. “Ah, I’m sorry Sakura-chan,” she said. “We don’t have any tables spare tonight, you and your team will have to eat elsewhere.”

I could feel Naruto droop behind me.

“There’s a table,” I said, interrupting whatever Sakura was going to say. I pointed at random, not breaking eye contact. “There’s some more.”

“Reserved, I’m afraid,” she said with a fake smile.

“Ah, that’s ok, Obaasan,” Sakura said, shooting me a puzzled look. “We don’t want to be a fuss! We’ll come back another time?”

The fake smile slipped, and surely Sakura must’ve noticed there was something wrong. “I don’t know that that’s the best idea -”

“I’m so sorry to hear of your supply troubles,” I said, deliberately raising my voice to be overheard. “I hope you get some fresher fish soon, and thank you for your honesty.” I bowed, so precisely perfect that my mum would’ve applauded, and grabbed Naruto’s sleeve as I turned to leave.

“Sasuke-kun, wait!” Sakura called after us. I ignored her, marching out the door with Naruto stumbling behind. Really. _Really?_ She was just going to stand there and blatantly lie about her restaurant being booked up, like we couldn’t see through her? It wasn’t even a good lie! How fucking _dumb_ did she think we were?

“Fucking reserved,” I muttered. “Not the best idea, bunch of piss-headed _troglodytes,_ the fuck does she take us for.”

“Uh, Sasuke?” Naruto said. I whirled on him, one step short of baring my teeth.

“ _What?_ ”

“Sasuke-kun, what was that?” Sakura asked, breathing heavily as she caught up. “You can’t just say that! Now everyone will think her fish is bad!”

I stared. That was the point. I didn’t see a problem.

Sakura huffed. “At least there weren’t too many people there tonight,” she allowed. “Emiyo-san will be able to sort this out.”

“You’re right,” I said with a decisive nod, and changed direction. I’d let go of Naruto’s arm but he trotted behind me anyway like I was still dragging him, looking vaguely constipated in his bewilderment. Sakura didn’t follow immediately, but I heard her steps behind us soon enough.

The fish stall was just packing up when I reached it, which was lucky. I was angry enough that I’d forgotten how late it was. “Ito-san,” I called, grabbing his attention as I approached.

“Uchiha-kun! Ah, sorry, I’ve just finished for the day -”

“You supply the fish for Emiyo’s, don’t you?”

He blinked, taken aback by my harsh tone. “Ah… yes?”

I nodded. “She’s been selling old fish. I thought it was odd because yours is very good, so I wasn’t sure if she’d changed supplier.”

Behind me, Sakura choked. I ignored her.

“Ah.” Ito-san frowned. “Thank you, Uchiha-kun. That’s good to know, and good of you to tell me.” He bowed, and I bowed back, once again so rigidly straight you could’ve used me as a protractor. It seemed that my temper brought out my mother’s training, who knew. “Was there anything else I can do for you?”

“No thank you,” I refused. Over his shoulder, I saw two people whispering to each other; one of them inclined their head in the direction of the sushi place. Good. “I’ll see you in the morning, Ito-san. Have a good night.”

He bowed, again, I bowed back, again, he wished us also a good night, and that was that. Job done.

Sakura waited until we were out of hearing range before she turned on me. “Sasuke-kun! Why did you say that? He’ll stop supplying Emiyo-san and then she won’t have any fish to sell, what if she closes?”

“She insulted Naruto,” I shot back. “She insults my team mate, I insult her fish. I’m just better at it than she is.”

“She didn’t insult Naruto,” Sakura protested weakly, but the guilty way she looked aside said that she knew that wasn’t quite true. I raised an eyebrow at her and she wilted further.

“Hey, this means we can get ramen though!” Naruto cut in, breaking the stand off. “C’mon Sakura-chan, bastard, I’ve got to introduce you to old man Teuchi, and if we’re lucky Ayami-neechan will be there too, she’s almost as pretty as you are Sakura-chan, and they make the best ramen so you’ll love it and -”

He kept talking, too fast and way too cheerful for either of us to get a word in edgeways. I was all too happy to drop the subject; even knowing that Naruto would grow up to one day be loved by Konoha didn’t make it ok that some people thought they could treat him like that. Didn’t they know he was the title character, the hero? And aside from that, couldn’t they see that he was a good person? He didn’t deserve to be, to be _abused_ like that. If Emiyo didn’t want to be put out of business by a few unfounded rumours then she should’ve tried being a decent human being. It would do her good to be shunned for something she didn’t do. See how she liked it.

I picked at my miso ramen, hiding a reluctantly amused snort when Naruto introduced me as “The bastard, don’t be fooled by the fact that he’s wearing a dress.” The yukata was still a bit too thin for comfort but the ramen was warm and we were sat close enough together that I could leech some of the heat radiating off Naruto. I’d noticed that he ran hot in the few spars back at the academy when we were matched up, but most people did when they were sweaty from training so I hadn’t thought much of it. I suspected now that he was just generally warm, and it was a struggle not to be too obvious about the fact that I was contemplating his worth as a hot water bottle.

Probably best not. Other than spars and the odd incidental touch - Kakashi had developed a truly annoying habit of ruffling my hair, which, given that he’d only been our sensei for a fortnight, did not bode well for the future - I don’t think I’d had any human contact since…

Huh. Since Tsukuyomi, when adult-me had held Sasuke-me and been stabbed a lot by Itachi. That was depressing. Had no one given me a hug when my entire clan died? I don’t think they did.

Jeez, canon-Sasuke. Your basket-case-ness was getting more understandable by the second.

“On the house!” Teuchi said when I tried to pay. “Celebration gift for graduating, all three of you!” He beamed, and Naruto grinned back, wide and relaxed and genuinely happy.

“You’re the best, old man!” he shouted as Sakura and I said our much politer thanks.

“Hey, we should do this again, right?” he said, arms crossed behind his head. “Team Seven tradition, ramen at the ramen stand!”

“It was nice,” Sakura agreed. “Maybe not after every mission, but we should definitely have team dinners more. Oh, or mochi!” She turned to me and blinked hopefully. “You like sweet things, right Sasuke-kun?”

“Hn,” I agreed, too full and too sleepy to care if she knew that because she was a stalker or if I’d ever actually said it. I could forsee an awkward you-hang-up-no-you-hang-up-first kind of situation as both of them dithered about ending the evening, so I waved goodbye and turned to go. “See you in the morning.”

“Oh, Sasuke-kun, I could walk home with -”

“I live the other way,” I called over my shoulder. Whichever way Sakura lived, the Uchiha compound was far enough removed that it would be the wrong way. I buried my hands in my sleeves for warmth and let my mind drift for all of a minute before I heard hurried footsteps catching me up.

“Really, Haruno,” I said, but I stopped when I saw it was Naruto behind me. “Um. Uzumaki?” I prompted when he just fidgeted.

His expression firmed in determination. “Here,” he said, thrusting a small container at me. “It’s from Ayame-chan. For - for being a team.” I took it, mildly confused. Why hadn’t she given it to us in the restaurant? Also, it was way too light to be ramen. It looked like a segment of a bento box. “And,” Naruto continued, “You should call me Naruto. I don’t mind.”

Oh, hell no. We were not bonding. I tried to give the box back. “Uzumaki -”

“Did you mean it?” he asked, completely ignoring me. “About old lady Emiyo?”

I paused. I mean, come on. What was I supposed to say to that? _No, I think she was right to treat you like less than dirt_? I wasn’t a great person but I wasn’t actual garbage. “She was being rude,” I settled for saying, and hoped it was sufficiently noncommittal. 

“You’re one to talk,” he said, but he sounded pleased. Feck. I scowled, attempting to regain my aloofness and distance.

“I’m not calling you Naruto.”

“You did before! It’s not hard. Say it with me, Na-ru-to.”

“You’re a pest and a menace and I regret being on a team with you.”

“Aw, it’s ok Hime-chan. Some words are hard. Just keep trying, you’ll get there eventually.”

“ _No._ ”

The box, which Naruto had successfully distracted me from giving back to him, damnit, ended up containing a trio of red bean mochi balls. They were coloured pink, and I was right; they _were_ in a bento box segment. I’m pretty sure it was Ayame’s, and I had no idea how to react to the fact that Naruto had asked if they had anything sweet just because Sakura said I liked sweet things.

Or to the fact that it was apparently important enough that Ayame had _given her own dinner_ to Naruto to pass on to me. Maybe she was just a pushover. She probably made spares. Someone else gave her mochi and she didn’t like it but was too polite to say so now she was relieved to be able to regift it to me. Exactly.

“I am trying really hard not to make you sad when I leave, idiot,” I muttered, pulling out one of the sweets. “Some help would be appreciated.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Kakashi: So I adopted a pomeranian and he's all growley and bitey, what do  
> Pakkun: Did you pat him on the head and tell him he was a good boy?  
> Kakashi: Yes but it didn't work ;_;  
> Pakkun: Did you feed him?  
> Kakashi: OH


	6. Chapter 6

Training the next morning was… interesting. I was distracted to begin with, the problem of the mochi weighing on my mind. The issue was that I knew how I’d react to a gift in my previous life, and I knew that there were important social rules for how to react to a gift in Konoha, but I _didn’t know what they were._

I was seven when my Sasuke-mum died. _Seven._ I’d never had to deal with being given things like this, and though I’d seen her both receiving things and giving things back in return, no one had ever taught me the guidelines. Who would? It wasn’t ninjaing, the academy didn’t care. _I_ didn’t care, except apparently for how I did and had spent most of the night stressing about it. I think the value of the gift is important, but the mochi were clearly home made, so did I have to make something in return? I couldn’t make mochi! Mochi took ages to make!

“Why,” I asked Plushie-tan around a mouthful of rice porridge, “do I have so many scrolls of sodding _haikus_ and not a single one of useful life skills? Why did I decide to be such an antisocial prick and not have anyone I could ask about these things? I bet Iruka told Naruto. I bet Naruto knows everything he needs to know about people, that’s probably why everyone loves him after the time skip while I end up stravaging around the landscape as the half dressed brooding loner.” I upended my bowl and left it in the sink, too stressed to wash it, then ended up washing it anyway because _ergh_ and staring in panic at the empty box on the side from last night.

“I shouldn’t have eaten them,” I muttered. “They were probably cursed. We’re ninja, I should’ve checked for poison, do I have to give the box back? I don’t want the box. It doesn’t match my bentos. What does it mean if I give the box back, is that good? Is that rude? Do I give it to Naruto or Ayame?” I hovered over it, then made a snap decision and shoved it in a drawer.

“Naruto won’t notice. He probably doesn’t care. It’ll be awkward to give him the box.”

Half way out the door I kicked off my shoes and retrieved the damn box. “It’s _Ayame’s box_ , the mochi were pink and homemade what if they were for a special event and I just _ate_ them like an uncultured swine, who just _gives_ people things without warning? _Rude people_ that’s who, unthinking assholes who read way too much into people getting pissy at sushi ladies. Maybe I didn’t even want mochi, did he think of that?”

By the time I actually made it to the bridge by the training grounds I’d talked myself in so many circles that I turned to Sakura in desperation as the only socially competent person on the team.

“Haruno, what the hell do I do with this,” I said, completely interrupting her greeting as I shoved the box at her. It sat innocently on my palm, a perfectly normal white box, and she looked at it like it was a trap.

Because she’s _smart._ Because ninja giving people boxes is _dangerous._ Why wasn’t I more like her. Why hadn’t I blown it up with a fireball and avoided this whole mess.

“Um, Sasuke-kun?” she asked. We were early enough that Naruto wasn’t here yet, and it would be several hours before Kakashi arrived. She didn’t have backup, so she ploughed on with her question. “What, um, what is it?”

“It’s Ayame’s box,” I said, giving it a little shake. How many times can you say box before it sounds ridiculous. Trick question; it sounds ridiculous to start with. _Box._ “She gave me mochi, and I ate it, and now I don’t know what to give her back.”

“She gave you mochi,” Sakura repeated dangerously, her hands clenching into fists and a vein appearing in her forehead that usually only Naruto could bring out. I guess that answered my question of whether Naruto had given sweets to both of us or just me, but now that my self-preservation instincts were waking up I realised I could have been more subtle in finding out.

“I didn’t ask her to,” I defended, taking a step back and curling a hand over the box to shield it.

“But you’re going to give her a gift in return?”

“I don’t want to be rude!”

Sakura took a step towards me. My death became suddenly more imminent, and I regretted. Nothing in particular, just. Regret. “Since when,” she said, voice perfectly calm in a way that leaked killing intent, “do you care about being rude?”

“She gave me mochi! And ramen! And she’s important to Naruto so I -”

“ _Naruto?_ ”

“Sakura-chan!” Naruto greeted, bouncing onto the scene with impeccable timing. I shoved the box in my pocket and tried not to look guilty. “Hey, what’s going on, bastard? What did you do?”

“We’re sparring,” Sakura said, cutting across my attempts to deny everything and distance myself from the current situation. “You and me, Naruto. No holds barred.” She cracked her knuckles and I barely resisted flinching.

“Wait, really?” Naruto asked. “You were serious about that? Hell yeah, it’ll be the best spar ever, believe it!”

The boy had the situational awareness of a dead lemming.

“ _Shannaro!_ ”

“Sakura-chan, wait -!”

I took a prudent couple of steps away from the beat-down that was happening and, for want of anything better to do, bent over backwards in a handstand. They looked busy, I didn’t want to interrupt, flexibility training wasn’t going to do itself.

A tree shattered somewhere across the training field, and four dozen Narutos yelled a war-cry in retaliation. I carefully balanced on one finger and started lining up shuriken to fire at the other side of the bridge.

The morning could have gone better, I reflected, but what was important was that no one died and we didn’t dwell on our mistakes.

“So,” Sakura said once everything had calmed down and she’d worked off her rage by beating multiple copies of Naruto to a pulp, “Which one of you is going to tell me what happened last night?”

Naruto, to his credit, didn’t stay pulpified for long. The parts of their spar that I’d actually watched were impressive; Sakura used the academy basic with perfect precision and, sporadically, brutal force, but she was slow to react and she tired easily. Naruto on the other hand was sloppy and ineffective in his individual moves, but made up for it by being relentless and surprisingly tricky - even underhanded, which for a ninja is definitely positive. Not to mention his clones, of course, though when she hit them right Sakura could take out three of them in a single blow.

I hadn’t seen them spar much in the academy, but if I had to guess I’d say Sakura would win there, but barely. Out here with a much longer spar and no structure or restrictions, I think Naruto came out on top. Maybe if he hadn’t had his healing factor it would’ve been different - I’m pretty sure Sakura got the real him with a punch to the nose that should’ve broken it - but given that he _did_ have it… Yeah, he was going to be a bitch to fight if he ever sorted out his taijutsu.

As for me, I’d managed to redirect three moving blades mid air to different targets with one curving shuriken throw, all while half way through a twisting backflip off the bridge post. I might not have Sakura’s strength or Naruto’s chakra, and I’m pretty sure that I didn’t have canon-Sasuke’s control of his fire jutsu, but I wasn’t exactly a slouch in the acrobatics and pointy things department.

“Why?” Naruto asked, tilting his head in confusion. “What happened last night?”

He turned to me for clarification, but I wrinkled my nose and stayed silent. I wasn’t… exactly sure what had pissed Sakura off?

Sakura huffed when neither of us provided answers. “You,” she said, gesturing roughly at Naruto, “tried to set Sasuke-kun up with your sister. And you,” a much more polite palm-first gesture at me, “were calling Naruto by his first name. _Explain._ ”

Ah, shit. I did? Naruto perked up instantly. “He did?”

“He told me to,” I defended, shifting blame like the champ I was. The first part of her statement registered, and I made a face. “Also, no one’s setting me up with anyone. I’m a strong independent ninja-person and I don’t need no man. Woman.”

“Wait,” Naruto said, frowning, “who’s setting you up with their sister?”

“ _No one._ ”

“You are!” Sakura accused. “You’re taking advantage of Sasuke-kun’s weakness by bribing him with food, you _know_ he’s not rational when he’s hungry!”

“Hey now,” I objected, because that was totally not true.

“I’m not! I don’t even have a sister, and if I did she could do better than the bastard!”

“Ouch,” I muttered.

Sakura steepled her fingers together and glared at Naruto over them. I seemed to have been forgotten, which, given that the conversation seemed to be a competition of who could insult me most with offhand comments, was more than a bit unfair. “Just to be clear,” she said, “Ayame-san is not your sister, she didn’t give Sasuke-kun mochi, and you aren’t helping her steal his virtue?”

“Oh my god Haruno, _why._ ”

“Ayame-neechan’s not my sister,” Naruto confirmed. “I don’t have _any_ sisters, even though if I did she would totally be the best sister because she’s pretty and kind and makes ramen, believe it. And she gave me mochi to give to the bastard, but only because I asked her to, and I don’t get how a virtue can be stolen but she wouldn’t do that because she’s _nice._ ”

“Oh.” Sakura deflated, shoulders drooping. “What kind of mochi was it?”

“Uh… pink?” Naruto hazarded. That didn’t seem to be the answer Sakura wanted.

“Strawberry?” she guessed.

“Red bean,” I said. They both nodded, which meant they’d remembered I was actually here, which was nice. I frowned, because Sakura was way too down. Her moods changed fast at the best of times, but this seemed an over reaction. “Would strawberry mean something?”

She glanced over at me and hummed instead of answering. “And you… You call him Naruto now? And you call Kakashi-sensei Kakashi. That’s… That’s good. Um.”

I frowned harder. I hadn’t even noticed that I’d called Kakashi his first name. It was too ingrained from knowing him as a character, and I hadn’t spent enough time with him as a person to separate the two. A bit like how my mum was my mum instead of Mikoto, but Fugaku was Fugaku because he hadn’t actually featured in my Sasuke-memories as much more than a vaguely disapproving authority figure.

But that wasn’t really something I could explain, so I said, “He’s Sharingan no Kakashi. It’s how everyone knows him, it’s what he’s famous as.”

“Sensei’s famous?” Naruto asked, but I waved him off. Sakura was being weird, and I wanted to know why.

“Oh,” she said again, and shrunk in on herself further. “It makes sense. You’re going to be really strong, so it’s good they gave you a good sensei.” She looked between me and Naruto miserably, and it clicked.

Hadn’t that been a big thing in the story, that Naruto and Sasuke had their epic friendship rivalry and kept getting stronger and Sakura got left behind? I scowled, chewing my lip as I tried to work out if we were doing that. I didn’t think we were? Maybe she was just being insecure. Why was she being insecure. Should I leave her to it? She got over it before, didn’t she? Should I say something?

She pulled herself together enough to give us both a frail and clearly fake smile, and I scowled further.

“Us,” I said. “Gave us a good sensei. And being famous doesn’t make him a good teacher, he’s still a dick.” I waited for her to call me out on my rudeness, but she just nodded distractedly. I made a frustrated sound and leaned forward to catch her attention. “You’re the team leader,” I said, perhaps more harshly than I meant to. “If we’re going to be strong then you are too. All three of us.” I turned my scowl on Naruto as well, because this was important, and waiting for character development to happen naturally was boring and annoying and took too long. “Because we’re a _team_.”

“Yeah, believe it!” he cheered on cue, leaping forward and grabbing both me and Sakura in one-armed strangled holds. I pitched forwards with a startled _hrrk_ , shoulders rising instinctively as I squashed the urge to stab him and roll out of danger. “We’re going to be the best team ever and Sakura-chan’s going to be the best team captain and we’ll all be famous like sensei and it’ll be the _best!_ ”

“You mean it?” Sakura said, eyes as wide and startled as I felt. I was glad I wasn’t the only one to react badly to hugs. Was this a hug? It still felt like an assault. Sakura was doing better than me at not flinching though, so maybe the surprise was for show and she actually felt no fear.

“What he said,” I choked out, prying Naruto’s arm off me and sitting back. “Haruno -”

“Sakura,” she interrupted. She nodded, chin rising stubbornly. “If we’re a team, then you should call me Sakura, Sasuke-kun.”

Ugh. Seriously? Now I wouldn’t be able to pass off calling Naruto Naruto as a one off, I’d have to be friendly to both of them.

Actually, no, it was just a name. I could still be as much of an asshole as I liked, just an asshole on first name terms with them. I could live with that. “Sakura,” I conceded, then hurried to add before she and her fantasies could get any ideas, “but only because you’re my teammate.”

She still blushed. _Damnit._

The team dynamic felt odd for the rest of the day. Not bad odd, in fact probably _good_ odd, just… confusing odd. Both Sakura and Naruto stuck way too close, finding apparently unending delight in the way I had to use their first names every time I spoke to them. Even when I snapped at them and took physical steps back to put some space between us they followed me, and it was like my glares had suddenly lost all effectiveness.

I didn’t like it.

Worse, their good mood was infectious, and Kakashi was in _fine_ form because of it.

“I’m not a puppy,” I ground out, scowling up at him and picturing, vividly, what exactly I would do with the three shuriken in my fist if he turned his back on me for just a second.

“Well you’re a bit short to be a full dog just yet, Sasuke-kun,” he chirped. “Keep eating your vegetables though and you’ll soon grow up big and strong!”

“It’s ok, bastard! Me an’ Sakura-chan will keep you safe even if you stay shrimpy forever.”

I transferred the scowl to Naruto. “ _Keep me safe?_ ” I hissed dangerously. “I don’t need you to keep me safe. And I’m not shrimpy!”

“But Sasuke-kun,” Sakura protested, practically skipping in place as she turned back to us. “We’re a team, and teams look out for each other!”

She was too far away to reach so I swiped a foot out at Naruto instead and sent him tumbling backwards into a tree. He deserved it, I reasoned, relishing his surprised squawk. He’d nodded, he knew what he was letting himself in for.

He also disappeared in a puff of bunshin smoke and a replacement dropped out the branches to grin at me. “Fuck’s sake, how many of you are there?”

“The Naruto clone army is unending and unstoppable, believe it!”

I dispatched that one with a kunai between the eyes. It died, still grinning, and the next one skipped forward to ask Sakura as team leader if we could stop for snacks soon, Sasuke-bastard was getting cranky.

My eye twitched and I barely stifled a growl. Actually wait, why stifle. Repression is bad for the soul. Let the growl out, feel your anger be released into the void.

“There there, Sasuke-kun,” Kakashi said, patting me on the head. I aimed my fistfull of shuriken at his crotch and smirked in satisfaction at the shunshin-leaves he left floating gently downwards in his wake.

“Alright, team!” he said, reappearing on the path in front of us. “Today’s mission is a rescue mission. You need to find the daimyo’s wife’s little Tora-chan and deliver her safe and sound back to her loving family.” He tossed a d-rank scroll at Sakura and waved us a lazy salute. “Remember, Tora-chan’s safety is paramount. Bye!”

“A rescue mission!” Naruto enthused, hopping in place as he waited impatiently for Sakura to read the scroll. “Hey bastard, you hear that? They’ve finally recognised how great Team Seven is, the daimyo must’ve personally requested us!”

“It’s still a d-rank,” I pointed out. “She probably left Tora at the playground and needs someone to pick her up.”

“It says here she’s lost somewhere in the woods behind the palace,” Sakura said, scrunching her nose in concentration as she read. “Um, but I think… Tora-chan’s a pet?”

“A pet?” Naruto asked. “The daimyo’s wife has a pet tiger? That’s _amazing._ ”

“Oh,” I said, remembering. “It’s a cat. That makes sense.”

Naruto wobbled on the edge of deflating, then settled in to inspirational pose number two with his hand pointing decisively forward. “Then we’ll do the best cat rescue Konoha’s ever seen! No creature is too small for the heroes of fire country, the great Team Seven! No one gets overlooked or left behind and that includes the cats, believe it!”

“Do you actually have to say _believe it_ after everything you say,” I wondered, “or do you choose to do it on purpose?”

“It’ll be a great training exercise,” Sakura said, completely ignoring me. Rude. “We can fan out and keep in touch and use the search patterns like they taught us in the academy, and if we practice our stealth as well we’ll find her in no time.”

“The quietest ninjas ever, believe it!”

They high fived, and I was left to appreciate the absurdity of the situation by myself for all of three seconds before they both turned to me with their hands up expectantly.

“I’m not high fiving you.”

“We’re a team, Sasuke-kun!”

And because it’s my narrative and I can, I’m going to cut scene here, and leave you believing that I did not, in fact, high five them.

Psych, you read that and thought I did. I actually didn’t. They got me with a fist bump instead.

Tora, it turned out, was easy to find. We’d split to cover a grid pattern, each of us with a small walkie-talkie radio that Kakashi had apparently given Sakura this morning, and I found Tora by virtue of walking quietly and keeping my eyes open.

I felt vaguely cheated.

“I thought you were meant to be a demon cat and really good at hiding,” I grumped, looking up in the branches of the tree with an eyebrow raised. Tora startled, clearly only just now noticing me - at least _one_ of Team Seven can actually achieve peak sneakiness, and it’s not Sakura or Naruto - and flattened herself against the branch, fur bristling and tail lashing furiously behind her.

I rolled my eyes and flopped down to sit between the roots.

“You’re not stuck,” I told her. “This tree is easy climbing. I’m not coming to get you.” Then, to complete the picture of nonchalance and calm, I leaned my head back against the bark and closed my eyes.

I didn’t stop watching her, of course. I stretched out with the same sense I used to find replacement objects for kawarimi, hovering just close enough to her that I’d feel it if she tried to run. It wasn’t a chakra sense, I don’t think; it worked on chairs, logs, Kakashi’s Icha Icha - it was just like reaching out with my fingers and grabbing something, except instead of fingers I used chakra, and instead of grabbing I yanked something towards me and switched places with it. All I was doing now was… not yanking.

I didn’t say it was a very useful sense. Kawarimi was an e-rank jutsu, basic enough to be taught before we’d even been properly introduced to our chakra; I didn’t expect any bastardisation of the technique to be much use in the wider world. It was what I had though - kawarimi, illusion bunshin, henge. Immolation jutsu, inexpertly modified into a keep-warm jutsu with a small chance of burning side-effects. Grand fireball, given enough time, enough arm protection, and a lot of vaseline to salvage the damage it did to my lips.

Listed out like that it was a bit pants, to be honest with you. Kakashi would teach Team Seven tree walking and water walking, and, if the chunin exams went the same way, he’d teach me an A-rank assassination technique. I’d already tried looking for scrolls left around the clan compound and come up with a whole load of metaphors for how the changing seasons represented people getting older and dying, but very little that I could use in the way of actual ninjutsu. If there was a Konoha central library full of instructions then I didn’t know about it, and the only other source I could think of was the forbidden scroll Naruto’d stolen from the Hokage.

I was trying to get stronger to keep myself alive and eyeballed, not commit suicide by chakra exhaustion. Or death god sacrifice. Or whatever other stupidly reckless techniques the scroll contained.

How did canon-Sasuke do it? Was I missing something he’d found? Was he also pants until he’d unlocked his sharingan? I didn’t like the idea of relying on it. Best case scenario, I got the fancy eyes, used the fancy eyes with no bad side effects, and managed to keep them secret from the entire world for evermore. Or at least until I met up with Itachi. Worst case scenario, they drove me mad, everyone knew I had them and tried to take them from me, and by using them as a crutch I destroyed my ability to fight or learn new things without them.

Or died. I should probably put died in the worst case scenario list.

My mouth twisted, tugging the lip I was chewing out from between my teeth. In all honesty, it’d be better for the story if I died and took my eyes with me than let them fall in the wrong hands. That was a depressing thought though, so I resolved not to think it. If I died I’d be dead. If that happened then the rest of the story could go fuck itself because I wouldn’t be there to care.

“Oh, hush,” I muttered to Tora. She’d crept closer once it was clear I wasn’t going to leap on her, and was now perched on a branch just above me. I tipped my head back and opened my eyes in a slow blink so I could better pout at her. “I’m not a bad person. I just have priorities. You’d do exactly the same thing if you were in my situation.”

“Mrrr,” Tora disagreed, and stepped down on my shoulder with all the elegance of a noble princess. A rather fat and fluffy noble princess with a tail that ended up directly up my nose, but still. Elegant.

“Yeah yeah, laugh it up. This is why I replaced the quasi-antagonist in the story and not the hero.” She butted my hand imperiously until I started petting her, scritching behind her ears and ignoring the claws she was kneading into my leg. I shifted to give her a better lap for sitting on and, subtly, to reposition her away from certain areas.

Just because I didn’t like the penis didn’t mean I wanted it stepped on, ok.

“God, can you imagine if I _had_ been the hero? Canon-Sasuke and Sakura and me as Naruto? The world would be doomed. Hell, canon-Sasuke and Naruto and me as Sakura, that wouldn’t be any better.” I pulled a face at the thought. I just… wasn’t hero material. My job as Sasuke was to stay out the way and let Naruto and Sakura be awesome, and I was fine with that. The world would be easier if they were fine with that too, but they were being confusing and clingy and I didn’t know how to make them stop.

“At least you’re straight forward,” I muttered to the now purring puddle of fur in my lap. “You just want me because I’m comfy, right?”

“Bastard!” Naruto yelled, appearing out the trees with a sudden flail of orange and sending me leaping for the canopy. “Sakura-chan, I found him!” He disappeared in a puff of smoke, leaving me crouched on a branch that was technically too thin to support my weight, one hand cradled protectively around Tora and the other bristling with sharp things in a defensive formation.

“What the fuck,” I muttered, straining with my senses to see if there were any more of him. Where the hell had he come from? I thought he wasn’t sneaky. I mean, yes, pranks, but seriously? How distracted _was_ I?

Tora’s sharp yowl of protest brought me back to the present, and I adjusted my grip to be more comfortable for her. “Sorry. It’s ok, he won’t hurt you. He just startled me.” She wriggled out of my arms and stood on my shoulders, claws digging painfully into my collar. Apparently it gave her a better position to arch her back and hiss from. “I _know_ ,” I commiserated. “He’s always that loud. Sometimes I wonder if he has hearing problems.”

Scrambled footsteps heralded their approach again. Nothing so crass as snapping twigs - we _had_ been brought up in the trees - but neither of them were making any attempt to be subtle, and I shifted to a better branch so Tora would feel safer. Her claws were a few very short inches away from my jugular, it seemed sensible. She crouched, digging in tighter to my shoulders, and mrowled a warning directly in my ear.

“Sasuke-kun!” Sakura called, skidding to a halt at the base of the tree. “What happened, where were you? Are you ok?”

“I’m fine,” I said, keeping my voice calm and level. “Why, what’s wrong?”

“What’s _wrong?_ ” Naruto echoed. “You disappeared! Off the comms! We couldn’t find Tora-chan and then we couldn’t find you, we thought you’d been eaten by tigers!”

I blinked, then fished in my pocket for the walkie talkie. It was flashing red at me. Tora spat at it and tried to bat it out my hand until I held it out of her reach. “Sorry,” I said, “I think I had it on mute.” I pressed the button on its side with my thumb and it crackled to static life, cutting off again into silence as soon as I stopped pressing.

Oops. I’d thought it was like a phone.

Sakura made a wordless sound of frustration below me while Naruto flapped and tried to calm her down. “It’s fine, Sakura-chan, he’s all fine. He’s even got Tora-chan! Mission success!”

“You!” Sakura shouted in response, glaring up at me. “How am I supposed to team captain you to fame if you aren’t where you’re meant to be, huh? We’re going to the Hokage. Bring the cat!”

She whirled in a storm of pink and started stomping off in the direction of the tower. I blinked after her, thrown for a complete loop. Wasn’t she meant to be… giggly? What?

“C’mon, bastard!” Naruto chivvied when I didn’t come down fast enough. “Kakashi-sensei’s not here so Sakura-chan’s responsible. You have to do what she says! I mean, she’s team leader, you always have to do what she says. But now you have to doubly do what she says. How did you catch Tora-chan, anyway? Did you use the plan Sakura-chan made?”

“Ah, no,” I said, dropping smoothly to the floor with a hand up to steady my passenger. She nipped my finger in protest and walked down my chest until I had to carry her properly or drop her - and the shirt she wasn’t letting go of - on the floor. “I just waited under her tree until she sat on me. Also, what do you mean Kakashi’s not here? He’s been watching us from the village.”

“How would he watch us from the village? There’s forest in the way, he can’t see us.”

I… didn’t actually have an answer for that. Huh. Maybe Sakura was right and she had been left as the one responsible. That seemed… negligent? Nah, Kakashi was probably just watching us via jutsu instead. He was tricky like that, who knew what nefarious ways he had to spy on people.

“Boys!” Sakura demanded sharply, and I resettled Tora in my arms and trotted alongside Naruto to catch up.

_Interlude: Kakashi and the Sandaime: the return of the nosy bastards._

“And how is Team Seven getting on, Kakashi?”

“All still alive last I checked, but they’re meant to be hunting Tora-chan this afternoon so who can really say.”

“Hm. I’m told they went out for a team dinner last night. I’m glad they’re settling into a cohesive unit. I even hear that young Sasuke dressed up for the occasion, and was quite vehement in his defence of Naruto. Though it is a shame; I rather liked Emiyo-san’s sushi.”

…

“How nice it would be, Kakashi, to get reports on my newest genin from their senseis instead of from second hand village gossip. Truly a novel experience in my old age.”

“Hm? Oh, Sasuke’s doing alright. He’s fine.”

“Kakashi.”

“He understands the theory of teamwork better than I was expecting him to. The application could do with some improvement though. A lot. Anything, really.”

“Hm. And Naruto and Sakura, how are they taking it?”

“They… At the moment, they’re unwilling to leave him out, but by constantly working on his own he’s establishing patterns of behaviour that will be difficult for them to break in the future.”

“I see. Well, that’ll have to change, won’t it? It would hardly be fair to them to be left on an unbalanced team.”

“Hai, Hokage-sama.”

“Change a bit faster, perhaps, than being left to discover it on their own.”

“... Hai, Hokage-sama.”

“Oh, and if you’d submit the written reports next time then we can avoid this whole rigmarole, hm? Think how much easier that would make my life.”

“But think how much harder it would make mine.”

“ _Kakashi._ ”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm in two minds about the Sandaime. Do we like the Sandaime? I'm not sure. Plus points for a cool hat and having ramen with Naruto that one time. Minus points for politics and that godawful jumpsuit. Hmm.


	7. Chapter 7

“So!” Kakashi said, sitting cross legged on the floor. “Lesson time. Sit yourselves down, my darling munchkins, old Sensei’s got a jutsu for you.”

As a unit, we froze, staring at him suspiciously. He _looked_ like Kakashi, and he’d even shown up the usual three hours late to the bridge that morning, but he hadn’t dodged all responsibility and dumped us on a d-rank while he sat up a tree reading porn. It didn’t add up.

He patted the wooden boards of the bridge invitingly. We traded unsure glances; Sakura flared her chakra in a subtle _kai_ and Naruto sniffed the air. Me, I poked gingerly at the pocket I knew he kept Icha Icha in with my kawarimi-sense, and waited for him to shield it protectively from my reach.

“No genjutsu,” Sakura confirmed in a low voice.

“Smells like dog,” Naruto said.

I nodded to add my agreement and we cautiously sat down. Sakura, as ever, took point. “What kind of jutsu, sensei?” she asked.

“So suspicious,” he complained. “And here I was going to let you choose! But choose wisely, murderlings: you get one jutsu, and only one jutsu.” The sky behind him darkened ominously, clouds rumbling in as his voice got impossibly deeper. I shivered in response, and Sakura performed another surreptitious _kai_ to try to dispel them.

It didn't work, of course, but it was still comforting to realise that it was an illusion.

He clapped his hands suddenly, dispelling the clouds and making all of us jump. “And that’s it! Just tell me what you want and if you’re convincing, your beloved sensei will provide!”

There was a long and heavy pause. None of us said anything. I half expected Naruto to ask for a really cool jutsu, but he was following mine and Sakura’s lead waiting for the trap.

“Maa,” Kakashi, said, slumping his shoulders. “So uncute. But if you don’t _want_ the jutsu…”

“We want it,” Sakura said, leaning forward. “We’re just… trying to look underneath the underneath, Sensei. Like you taught us.” She batted her eyes at him and smiled winningly, and I barely resisted snorting. But still, she had a good point. Even when he’d taught Team Seven things in canon, he hadn’t let them choose, so what would Kakashi ‘those who abandon their team are less than trash’ Hatake be looking for us to choose? And what would he do if we chose the wrong thing?

I didn’t know the answer to that last one, but for the first: “We need to pick a jutsu that benefits the team, not just us as individuals,” I said. I tried to think back over the d-ranks we’d done recently. Was there anywhere in particular our team work had failed that he was trying to put right? Naruto’s clones sometimes got underfoot and I’d forgotten how the walkie talkie worked when we were finding Tora, but other than that I couldn’t think of anything.

“So… where none of us can do something, one of us needs to learn to fill in the gap?” Naruto guessed. “Like how you need both shuriken and kunai, because they do different things?”

“And senbon,” Sakura agreed, warming to the topic. “And if you only have one you can kind of cope, but it’s better to learn how to use all three.”

Excuse you, there’s nothing shuriken can’t do if you try hard enough. Pointy, can be stabbed, can be thrown, can be poison coated - what more do you need from life?

In typical Kakashi fashion, Kakashi hummed and pulled out his book. “Let me know when you’ve chosen one,” he said, and flicked it open to a well worn crease in the middle.

“Ofsted would totally fail you,” I muttered, glaring at the orange book. I had nothing against porn, and given how popular the books were I doubted that it was even particularly _bad_ porn, but what if Sakura got curious enough to steal it? She was already a scary fangirl person. Giving her _inspiration_ was just asking for trouble.

“What was that, bastard?” Naruto asked, and I refocused on the conversation.

“I was just thinking we should… work out what each of us are good at, so we know what areas we’re missing?”

“Yeah! I’m good at clones and henge. Sakura-chan, your turn!”

“Um, I’m good at, um. Books and exams?”

How long does it take a twelve year old girl to stop being insecure about herself and start believing in her abilities. Hadn’t we covered this? Didn’t we _keep_ covering this? This is why Kishimoto had a timeskip, so no one had to actually _watch_ the painful process of Team Seven growing up.

“I’m good at throwing things and being bendy,” I said. “Great. Glad that’s all sorted.”

“Ah, Sasuke-kun, you’re also the best in the year at taijutsu,” Sakura protested. “And you got Sensei with kawarimi in the bell test!”

“An’ you’re a sneaky bastard, bastard,” Naruto added, nodding sagely. “And Sakura-chan, you’re really strong and you’re a good leader and good at strategy.”

Well, if we were complimenting each other. “You have good chakra control,” I said, tilting my head towards Sakura. “Naruto, your chakra control is abysmal, but you have loads of it. You also have a healing factor, at least for minor wounds.” Major wounds as well, but there was no way I could know that, so I kept quiet about it.

Naruto preened under the praise, and though Sakura hid it better I could tell she was pleased as well. It was… sad. Did no one tell them they were good at things? Kakashi, look at your students. You’re their teacher, why aren’t you doing something about this?

Oh wait, he was. He was outsourcing it to me. Dickhead.

“And Naruto has those kunai he made when trapped sensei,” Sakura said, warming to the topic. She tilted her head curiously. “What were they? We weren’t taught that in the academy.”

“The kunai? Oh! They were clones with henge on top, believe it!”

I frowned. I hadn’t seen the trap - I’d been under a genjutsu at the time - and I knew Naruto had a reputation for henge and sexy no jutsu, but henge just didn’t work like that. “It can’t have been,” I protested. “They were solid. Henge is an illusion.”

Naruto squinted at me. “What? No it’s not. Henge is a transformation, see?” He held his hands in the familiar ram seal, and with a puff of smoke I was looking at a perfect copy of myself. “See, bastard?” the Naruto-me said, in, minus the inflection, my exact voice.

Actually, that set warning bells ringing. Henge can copy sounds as well as looks, but it should _copy_ them. If Naruto’d never heard me speak in that specific tone then he shouldn’t be able to mimic it - unless he… had… my vocal chords?

My mind boggled.

“That’s not real,” I said, scooting closer to poke him in the chest. He felt real. I grabbed the collar of his shirt, looking for the stitches I’d put in by hand when I cut out the front part and sewed down the raw edge. They were there, exactly as they should be, and when I pulled my own shirt forwards to compare them they were _exactly the same._

“What the hell? How did you know how many stitches I had?”

“Huh? What do you mean how many stitches?” Naruto asked, pushing me into a better position so he could look. “Hey hey, how come you're so much better at sewing than me, bastard?”

“Natural talent,” I said dryly, and moved on to tugging his hair. It felt like mine. It _was_ mine. What the _hell_. A close enough mimic to fool someone during a cursory inspection was one thing, but he had the exact same uneven-ness from where I couldn’t see round the back to trim it properly. Either he was a grade-A stalker and I hadn’t noticed or he was somehow filling in details with his henge without having to consciously consider them. If he could henge my voice box and my _clothes_ , then could he henge into someone stronger and get their strength? 

Though, speaking of grade-A stalker, Sakura had been suspiciously quiet. I glanced over at her curiously. She was flushed bright red, staring at the two of us with wide, slightly glazed eyes.

“Oh fuck me, I forgot the pervert.” I pushed Naruto away and tried desperately to ignore how my cheeks burned.

“Forgot the what?” Naruto asked, blinking, then whirled on Kakashi with a righteous fury that looked hilariously out of place on my face. “Sensei, stop perving on Sasuke!” he demanded. “I didn’t even use sexy no jutsu!”

I choked. Sakura choked. Kakashi turned a page and said, mild as butter, “Maa, did you say something Naruto?”

“Just change back,” I said, dropping my head in my hands. Why me. Why? I was a good person. I had aspirations to advance the plot in a world saving direction at some point. I didn’t deserve anything that happened to me. I lifted my head again to watch though as Naruto obliging de-henged himself, and now that I knew what to look for I could genuinely see his weight shifting and the grass moving ever so slightly to accommodate his bigger feet.

That jutsu was _insanely_ overpowered. At the risk of sounding repetitive, what. The hell.

“So wait, if you henge into a kunai do you _actually_ turn into a kunai? Can you still see? Can you still think? How do you know when to change back?”

He scratched his cheek. “I don’t know,” he admitted. “I just… do? Like, not _see_ see, but I can still… see? I’ve only turned my clones into kunai though. I don’t know what would happen if I turned me into a kunai. Should I try it?”

Sakura was still drooling, so I stepped up as the voice of reason and shook my head. “Not unless we know it’s going to work. Maybe your clones can work without a brain because they’re an extension of you, but if you turn your original self into something inanimate you might not be able to turn back.”

When I got my sharingan though, I was _totally_ seeing if Naruto could copy it. Basic survival theory; the more potential targets, the better chance each individual one had of making it out alive. If Kakashi had already revealed his I’d get Naruto to test his possible bloodline-copying abilities on him now, but again, future knowledge and needing to justify it. Boring as it was, my life depended on it. Or at least my freedom.

“So,” I said, putting aside all the glorious potential of Naruto’s god-modded henge technique, “That’s what we’ve got; what are we missing?”

Drool. Drool drool. That better not have been a fucking giggle, Sakura.

I waved a hand to catch her attention, fighting the urge to snap my fingers in front of her eyes. Hands were useful things, I didn’t want to risk losing mine. She shook herself back to the present with a squeak.

“Um. Um? Yes! Those are. Skills. That we have.”

Naruto and I exchanged glances. Mine conveyed _this is why I’m going to abandon you both and run away to my brother,_ but I’m not sure Naruto quite got the message because he just made a vaguely apologetic grimace and shrugged.

The sound of Kakashi’s book snapping shut broke the silence. “Time’s up, my adorable squirrel nutkins! What did you choose, hm?”

 _Adorable squirrel nutkins,_ Naruto mouthed, looking vaguely bewildered by it. I sympathised. Elite jounin or not, Kakashi was _weird._

No one answered him fast enough though, so in true teacher style he decided to pick on someone for an answer. “Sasuke! What does Sakura need?”

“She’s suited for close combat,” I said, slowly, trying to work out how to say _Tsunade and medical chakra_ in a way that would make sense in context. “But being that close makes her take damage, so… something to…” Could I just say it? Take a risk? Would Kakashi be suspicious? Would he do anything if he _was_ suspicious? Would my life be better if my sensei wasn’t a ruthless killer who was loyal to a village I wanted to defect from? Life’s great questions. “... Help her if she gets wounded?”

“Hm. And Naruto?”

Shit, I didn’t expect to be put on the spot. I couldn’t even _remember_ Naruto’s main fighting style - lots of clones, ever bigger and better rasengans, kyuubi? Therapy no jutsu? “Something to make his clones more effective,” I went for. “Maybe a long distance attack jutsu, because they get dispelled easily in taijutsu.”

“Ah. So you’ve put your teammates as the close range and long range fighters, but where are you, Sasuke?”

Did this man never _stop._ My mind raced; why wasn’t he letting the others answer? Why only me? Did he do this in canon? I couldn’t remember. I didn’t _know._ I fought to keep my heartbeat steady, because he could probably hear that - hell, even without it he could probably tell, and that was a problem because what reason, what earthly reason could I have for being so twitchy under his attention unless I was guilty and trying to hide it? Did he know? Did the hokage tell him that Itachi was innocent, and therefore he’d guessed that I was planning to follow him? What was the right answer, what could he be _looking for -_

“Support,” I said, hoping it didn’t come out too panicked. Support was team-worthy. Support was what someone who was invested in a team would say. God, please let support be ok. He tilted his head in a _go on_ gesture, so I hurried to justify it with my skill set. “I’m fast, and sneaky - I’m best suited to ambushes, or providing covering fire. I can complete mission objectives while Naruto and Sakura run distractions. I can - swap in, if someone’s hurt, with kawarimi like I did with Sakura.” Did I need to go on? This was so bad for my blood pressure.

“You don’t mind letting your teammates take the spotlight?”

I shook my head. “I don’t need to be the hero,” I said warily. 

“No,” Kakashi agreed, looking at me in a way I honestly couldn’t interpret. “You just want to be tall, ne Sasuke-kun?” Thankfully he moved on before I had to answer that, turning to Sakura and Naruto. I took a moment to breathe once his attention was off me.

It was, I reflected, possible that I was blowing things out of proportion. Maybe he was just being a good teacher (hah). Maybe the fact that I’d spent five years hiding not only adult-me’s secrets but also Itachi’s was making me paranoid. Maybe I should relax, act natural, and honestly try to be the twelve year old I was. Was pretending to be. Whichever. Whatever else Kakashi was in the series, he was still one of the good guys, and he still consistently put his team first - maybe I was included in that?

But geez, it was a lot to gamble with if I was wrong.

“If Sasuke-kun’s running support,” Sakura was saying when I tuned back in, “then he should be a medic or a genjutsu user, so he can provide backup if a fight goes wrong. Or some specialised teams have trackers or sensors as their support members, or if a ninja has a particular kekkei genkai or skill that’s essential for a mission they can be given a support role so the mission isn’t compromised if there’s combat.”

It was the classic answer, suited to the basic team dynamics we were taught at the academy. Naruto nodded along sagely, even though I was pretty sure he’d skipped those lessons and was just agreeing because it was Sakura saying it. If either of them had picked up on my reaction earlier, they weren’t showing it - and I was cautiously hopeful that they weren’t that good at hiding things, so. I was ok. I could deal. Life was good.

Ergh, optimism. I’d get hives if I continued like this.

“So what we need,” Naruto summed up, ticking points off his fingers, “Is a way for Sakura-chan to fight people and not get hurt, a way for me to fight people and hurt them, and a way for Sasuke-bastard to rescue anyone who is hurt. And it has to be super cool because we’re going to be famous. That’s the jutsu we choose, sensei!”

Sakura and I sweat-dropped. Kakashi, on the other hand, tapped his book against his chin and made a show of thinking about it.

“Maybe I could teach you… hmm, no. What about… no, that won’t work. Perhaps… best not. Ah!” He held up a finger, eye-smile firmly in place, and despite myself I leaned forwards with the other two. “Oh wait, not that one. Hmmm…”

“Sensei, c’mon! Stop teasing us and pick one!”

He held the suspense for a fraction longer, enough for Naruto to begin vibrating with impatience, then levelled his book at us decisively. “I have the perfect technique for you. Kakashi-sensei’s super powerful, super secret technique: Konoha style ninja art: tree climbing no jutsu!”

“Are you kidding me,” I blurted. Tree walking. _Tree walking._ All that fucking build up - tree walking? Did any of the past however many minutes of panic attack actually _matter_ for anything if he was just going to teach us _tree walking?_ He’d probably decided beforehand. It was probably in the Konoha sensei handbook, how to annoy your genin while making sure they mostly reach adulthood, dither about with meaningless questions then teach them motherfucking _tree walking_.

Don’t get me wrong, I wanted to learn tree walking. It was useful. Life saving, even. But what was the fecking point of making us list our skills and come up with what we needed a jutsu to do if he was just going to teach us that one anyway?

“But sensei, we can already climb trees,” Sakura said. It was the same tone of voice she might say, _but sensei, we can already walk down the street_ , because we were Konoha nin and that’s what we did.

“Oh?” Kakashi asked, and stood up in one smooth motion. “Well then, I suppose we’d best go and get our d-ranks for the day. If you already know the techniques then what’s poor sensei meant to teach you?” And, in a move than even I will admit looked kind of cool, he walked directly at the fence on the edge of the bridge, then _up_ the fence with his body parallel to the floor, over the top and down the other side, and smoothly over the water’s surface to get to the bank. All without breaking stride or seeming to notice the change between vertical and horizontal.

As impressive as it was to see on a screen, it was actually way more impressive in real life.

“Off to the Hokage,” he said cheerily. “Here I go, picking up a lovely mission for my lovely team. What a nice day to clean a sewer.”

We glanced at each other, then scrambled to our feet as one and dived after him. “Sensei, wait!”

“Stupid piss-fucking bitch-ass _tree,_ ” I growled, glaring at the splintered bark in front of me. I was going to set it on _fire._

“Sasuke-kun!” Sakura scolded from somewhere up in the canopy. I made a two fingered gesture at her which was entirely stolen from my old world but which I’m pretty sure she grasped the meaning of well enough.

“Now now, Sasuke-kun,” Kakashi tutted. “That’s no way to talk to a lady, is it?”

“Stupid piss-fucking bitch-ass tree- _san_.”

He sighed, shaking his head at me in mournful disappointment, as Naruto yelled a war cry in the background and started his millionth run-up of the day.

“Would you look at that, I think he’s getting further than you.”

I stabbed the kunai I was using to mark my progress viciously into the tree and whirled on him. “What is your _problem?_ ” I snapped. He blinked, eye wide and taken aback - or _seemingly_ taken aback, who the fuck knew with Kakashi. “Why do you keep comparing me to Naruto? Why do you keep needling me about not being a team player, or not being good enough, or not living up to being the rookie of the year?”

“Saa,” he said, and oh he was _good_ , because he even sounded completely wrong footed. Someone get him an oscar, quick. “I was encouraging your friendly rivalry? To motivate you and help you succeed?”

“Well, don’t,” I said shortly. “I’m not rival material and I don’t need to be better than him.”

He was quiet for a blissful second and I turned back to the tree, trying to calm my temper enough to summon my chakra. _Fire,_ I thought. _Uchiha are fire._ Fire was jumpy and inconsistent, but it could be just as powerful in a controlled smoulder as in a blaze of flames. When I thought I had it just right, I ran at the tree, using my momentum and the chakra on my feet to go up three four five steps -

The bark splintered. I slashed the kunai to mark my place and flipped off to land in a neat crouch. _Six steps._ Naruto was on at least nine, six was barely carrying me further than I’d get just on my speed.

“You don’t think much of yourself, do you?” Kakashi asked before I could run again. I gave him an unimpressed look, but even my wariness couldn’t see what the trap was in that. Didn’t mean there wasn’t one, just that it was too far underneath the underneath for me to find it. “Not a hero, not rival material, not tall. Not even fussed about rookie of the year status.”

“We’re not at the academy any more,” I said. “No one cares about being rookie of the year.” He hummed again, squinting at me, and I braced my shoulders to avoid hunching them and turned back to the tree. “Can I get back to failing this jutsu now, sensei?”

“I was going to call a break, actually. Can’t have Sakura-chan getting bored up there at the top, can we?” He eye-smiled, and waved her down from her tree without waiting for my answer. “Sparring practice! You and Sasuke, first to bleed or yield swaps out with Naruto.”

“Here?” Sakura asked, dropping down beside us and looking at the dense forest we were in. It was a far cry from our usual training field, and also offered her a distinct advantage given that she could use the trees but I couldn’t yet. Not beyond, oh, three metres off the ground.

Sometimes I wondered what I’d done to make Kakashi hate me.

“Here!” he agreed cheerfully, and pulled out his book to leave us to it. I shot him an annoyed look and swapped my kunai out for a brace of shuriken. Attacking from the ground when your enemy could move in any direction was going to be hard - and it didn’t matter that my taijutsu was better if I couldn’t _reach_ her to use it.

Unless...

“Hey, Naruto,” I called. “Can I borrow some clones?”

“Well now that’s just cheating,” Kakashi said. He didn’t sound like he was going to stop me, so I ignored him.

“And can you henge them? I need… ninja wire, more shuriken, and a smoke bomb.”

“Um, sure? I don’t think I can do the smoke bomb…”

“And more kunai and a really big net,” Sakura added sweetly. “Thank you Naruto!”

I returned her sharp smile with one of my own and pushed my annoyance at Kakashi out of my mind. Knowing Naruto, the net would be made of rope instead of wire. Plus, trees were made of wood, and if they burnt there’d be nothing left for her to climb.

Grand fireball, baby. Time to let off some steam.

By the end of the day I’d beaten Sakura, lost to Naruto, teamed up with Naruto and somehow lost to Sakura, then emerged victorious but only just from the three way free for all that followed.

I’d also made it to twelve steps up the tree. These were Hashirama trees. Twelve steps was piddly.

It was the first day, I think, that we’d spent the whole time training and not taken a single d-rank, and there was something immensely satisfying about the bone-deep ache it left in my muscles. I didn’t even care about the fact that I hadn’t mastered tree walking, or that I was sweaty and disgusting and had leaves stuck in my hair.

“Naruto, sit down,” I mumbled, flat on my back with an elbow thrown over my eyes. “You move too much. It’s tiring.”

He flopped next to me and poked me in the shoulder, ignoring my half-hearted attempts to bat him away. “Sakura-chan, I think you broke him.”

Her reply was a garbled moan from her own sprawled heap of exhaustion. “I hurt,” she complained. “Why do you have so much energy. Are you even _human_.”

The way Naruto stiffened next to me would be imperceptible to anyone else, but given that I both knew about the kyuubi and also had his leg pressed half against my arm, it was impossible to miss. I flapped a hand in Sakura’s direction and deflected for him, because I was magnanimous like that. “‘S genetic,” I said. “Uzumaki. They’re all monsters.”

He stilled, and I patted his knee. No worries, Naruto. ‘M good at secrets. I got your back.

“Wait,” Sakura said, levering herself up to her elbows. “I thought Naruto was the only one?”

“Nah. There was an Uzumaki on my mum’s genin team.” Were there more? I felt like there were more Uzumaki in the world. Maybe they happened after the time skip. “She ate ramen and was loud. Clearly related.” I let my eyes close and my mind drift, too tired even to call up the immolation jutsu to ward off the chill that was sinking in now that we’d stopped moving. Lucky Naruto was sat so close - he was my own personal furnace, so the left side of me at least was comfortably toasty.

“Was?” Naruto asked, cutting into my drifting. I crinkled my nose in displeasure but he kept talking. “Is she still… is she still around?”

The odd tone finally prompted me to move my hand and open my eyes. He turned away, the raw hope shuttering off his face almost before I could see it, but my stomach plummeted.

Shit. He wasn’t meant to know about Kushina yet, was he? Should I tell him? It seemed heartless not to, but it also really wasn’t my place. “She died when the kyuubi attacked,” I said awkwardly. “Sorry, Naruto.”

“No! Um, no, you don’t have to be sorry.” He smiled down at me - squinty eyed, fake, _wrong,_ and I felt like a total heel for bringing the subject up. “Bet your mum has some cool stories though, huh?”

“I, uh. She’s dead too.” I winced. _Total_ heel. “But I think her old team photo is somewhere, if you want?”

This time the smile was smaller, sadder, but at least not so jarringly false as before. I almost expected him to try to refuse, but all he said was, “Thanks, Sasuke.”

“Ah. You’re welcome?”

Thankfully, his smile morphed back to his usual grin and he leaned back on his hands, breaking eye contact. I let my head drop back down in relief that the feelings were finished and subtly inched closer. Because _warm._

“Hey, we should go to Ichiraku’s!”

“I’m in,” Sakura said almost immediately, lifting an arm like a flag. “I want pork. _Two_ pork.”

“I want a shower,” I said. Sakura groaned and Naruto kicked me with his knee. More nudged, really, but I still elbowed him back. “Then miso ramen.”

“You always have miso, Sasuke-kun.”

“Well, when they start serving fish I’ll have that, but until then leave me and my miso ramen alone.”

“No,” Naruto said. “You’re stuck with us, bastard, we’re not leaving you anywhere.”

I squinted a glare at him, but I was too tired to put any venom behind it and he just grinned wider back at me. Honestly. The things I put up with for the sake of body heat.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Kakashi: Your advice sucks he doesn't want to be a rival _now_ what the frick do I do  
> Gai: INTRODUCE HIM TO -  
> Kakashi: No
> 
> Alrighty lovelies, this wraps up the first arc which means that the next chapter takes us marching off in a Wave-wards direction. Thank you so much everyone for all your comments and kudos, it's _amazing_ and I'm so glad you're enjoying the fic :D 
> 
> I have Wave all written but I also have some tumblr asks in dire need of ficcing, so the next update will be in four days instead of two - keep an eye out on Thursday, and I do try to answer comments before I update as well. (If you're also on tumblr then please do join me - I'm [aethelar](http://aethelar.tumblr.com) over there as well)


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Welcome to the Wave arc.
> 
> I'm going to move new chapters to every three days instead of every two so that I can stay ahead of you guys in the writing and keep updating regularly. Enjoy!

“Sensei! You’re late. Are we doing more sparring today? Or! Or, are we learning another jutsu, but this time a super cool one? Like the bastard’s fireball! But _bigger_. And better. I still can’t believe you won’t share the fireball, bastard.”

By half past ten in the morning I’d probably lost the chance to tell Naruto it was too early for him to be this bouncy, but I shared a commiserating glance with Sakura anyway. Both of us were - not stiff, because ninja, but definitely _aware_ of the muscles and aches we’d picked up yesterday. Naruto, of course, was his usual hyperactive self with not even a bruise to show for it, skipping down the path towards the Hokage tower like a chipmunk on helium. It was horrifically unfair.

“It’s an Uchiha thing,” I grumbled, for the third time. “You have to have fire chakra. Because it’s fire. Which you are not.”

“But how do you know? I could be fire. If you’d teach me the jutsu then we could find out.”

“Maa, Naruto, it’s not polite to ask people to share jutsu if they don’t want to,” Kakashi chided. “Particularly clan jutsu. And Sasuke’s right about a fire affinity making it easier, though it is possible to use another elemental type if you need to.” He paused at that, then made a quiet _huh_ sound and shook his head. “But! Seeing as we didn’t do any missions yesterday, I thought we could have a full day of them today. There’s some dogs to be walked, the pig pens need cleaning, Shio-san’s septic tank has sprung a leak again….”

Sakura made a face like she’d just thrown up in her mouth. I sympathised. Dogs, really?

Naruto, on the other hand, took an aggressive step forward, struck inspirational pose number five with the asymmetric feet and the bent knees, and shouted, “No more d-ranks, sensei!”

My breath caught in my throat. Was this it? Was this… how many words in were we? Thirty thousand? Had we finally, _finally_ hit the Wave mission? I didn’t even want to know what the chapter count was. We’d spent _literally half the fic_ on d-ranks.

“No more d-ranks? But we did training yesterday! Maa, missions are still important, you know.”

Oh my god. Oh my _god._ I needed to sit down.

“Then give us a c-rank, Kakashi-dick-sensei! We’re going to be heroes, we need to do hero things, believe it!”

Sakura, hold me. _It’s happening._

The open door to the mission office was right in front of us. I was so keyed up that survival training had kicked in and lowered my heart rate and breathing to be barely detectable, kawarimi-sense vibrating out into the room and tracking everything from the chairs to the other ninjas to the _c-rank scroll on Iruka’s desk_.

I pushed it further, straining at the only other door in the room and practically growling a curse when I couldn’t get through. I’d never been more frustrated in my _life_ that you couldn’t kawarimi through solid objects. I needed to know on a primal level if there was a drunk bridge builder on the other side of that door, because if we’d missed our window, if we’d spent _too fucking long_ pissing about with d-ranks and Tallulah or whatever his name was had gone off with someone else, I had no idea what I would realistically do but it’d probably involve a lot of ice cream and a lot of swearing and basically, I deserved this, c’mon universe please let this be the wave mission, _please._

The door opened. I’d completely missed everything else that had happened, I was so focused on it. An old man swayed in, but he wasn’t drunk, and for a split section I felt the gaping chasm of the void opening beneath my feet before I realised that he smelt of sake, he was clutching an open bottle, and to the person I was before I’d spent five years in a ninja village he would look _exactly_ like a drunk old bridge builder.

I couldn’t help the victorious smirk I aimed at Sakura and Naruto, but both of them echoed it, so I accepted no blame. We were going to Wave, shit was going to go down, and right on cue the bridge builder - whose name I probably needed to learn - started insulting us for being preteen sproglets instead of the hardened killers he was hoping for.

_Yes._

Kakashi gave us an hour to get ready. I honestly wasn’t sure if this meant an actual hour because a client was waiting for us or a Kakashi hour because why break a habit of a lifetime, but I erred on the side of caution all the same. We’d covered mission kits and survival basics back at the academy so I had a standard checklist to go through and in theory it shouldn’t take me long to tick off what I needed for a short escort mission.

In reality…

“Plushie-tan, I don’t know what to _do_.” Spread out on the kitchen counter I had the basics: weapons, emergency food rations ( _including_ , and do you know how expensive this was, _fruit leather_ because I highly doubted there’d be dango waiting to be foraged in the wild and I could probably kiss ice cream goodbye for the next forever), needle and thread, first aid kit, toothbrush, water bottle.

It was less than I wanted to take, but ninja were expected to travel light - with some careful packing, I could get the whole lot in my pockets and weapons pouch. Wave was… what, two days for an experienced ninja? So three for a genin team? In theory we were expected to make do without a sleeping roll or a change of clothes so we could maximise speed and efficiency, but we _were_ travelling with a civilian. How fast did civilians travel? I honestly couldn’t remember. Not that I’d done much long distance walking when I was a civilian myself, but I somehow couldn’t see Tazuna hauling ass on a bike, so.

“See, Kakashi was ANBU. He’s hardcore. When Itachi was ANBU he’d go for _weeks_ with nothing but a toothpick and a dead leaf. Kakashi probably expects us to do the same thing, because he just doesn’t seem the sort to make allowances for people being puny and genin. But if we’ve got a civilian then we’re taking longer and making proper camp each night, right? So…” I pivoted on my heel, holding my arms out to gesture at the next kitchen counter. It had a sleeping roll, backpack, a small heat proof bowl that I couldn’t call anything other than a mess tin despite the fact that mess tins didn’t exist in Konoha. It also had a change of clothes, a fire starter, rope, and a waterproof cloak that doubled as a rain-guard to tie over the fire or my sleeping roll. Also more shuriken. Poisoned shuriken, thank you mum for your beautiful garden of deadly death. And wire - I couldn’t keep relying on Naruto to provide clone-wire, so I’d found some of my own. It was fun to play with.

I was _this close_ to mastering a poison shuriken yoyo that didn’t slice my fingers off. _This close._

“ _But_ ,” I continued, turning to my third and final kitchen counter - actually a chopping board balanced over the sink, but I’d run out of other space and it was only Plushie-tan there to judge - “If the mission goes tits up and lasts for, say, a _month_ , then we’d need more, right?”

The last counter had more clothes, more fruit leather, the sort of first aid kit that could conceivably deal with a chakra-exhausted jounin who’d faced down a big dude with a sword, soap, more more clothes, a scroll containing the epic retelling of the life and times of Uchiha Tajima (I was hoping that Madara’s dad would drop some key secrets about Madara himself; no luck so far, but damn did he throw shade at the Senju, it was great), and a few more clothes for good measure.

I might _look_ like I wore the same clothes all the time, but behind the scenes I went through a minimum of two outfits a day. Three if it was a rough day and I’d earnt an evening of yukata and blanket snuggles. Four if you counted pyjamas. And before you laugh at me, consider please that I started each day with a workout, followed that up with a spar, and then moseyed on into a day of physical labour and/or more training. Consider also that I lived in fear of a dictatorship that had killed my clan and wanted my eyeballs, and that being a sweaty bedraggled mess was one of the very few problems in my life I could control enough to fix.

I would like to clarify that I wasn’t actually dirty. I just had very high standards and led an active life. In fact, given my practically obsessive showering tendencies, I was probably one of the cleanest twelve year olds you’ve ever met. When I wasn’t covered in river mud.

Moving on.

“What do you reckon?” I asked Plushie-tan. “I’m probably missing things. I’m definitely missing things. I need a bigger bag. I need _storage scrolls._ Why don’t I have storage scrolls.” I’d found… eight, I think, in various places around the compound. One was so old the ink had smudged and made it unusable, four were locked and I couldn’t get through, and the last two held food supplies from the bakery and I didn’t dare open them in case that disrupted the stasis seals and everything went off. Or in case things weren’t under stasis seals in the first place and had already gone off, in which case I _really_ didn’t want to open them.

The last one seemed to be a normal storage scroll, and I’d spent a whole summer a couple of years back trying to reverse engineer it and find out how it worked. I’d reasoned at the time that seals were perfect for me, with my logical, computer oriented background and unique (to Konoha, at least) way of looking at things. I had all the makings of a sealing savant, and once I’d got my sharingan open and could copy seals on the fly, I’d be set.

As it turned out, I was not a sealing savant. Javascript didn’t work on chakra ink. I would not be single handedly reviving the hiraishin or dropping explosive seals across the four corners of the continent.

Using ready made storage scrolls though, that I could do, except they were expensive and I didn’t have any. I worried at a healing cut on my lip and debated whether I had time to run out and buy one. “Probably not,” I decided. “Damnit.”

Backpack or pockets. Lightly packed backpack or stuffed as full as it gets. Could I bring some extra scrolls for reading material. _Decisions._

I arrived at the gate with four minutes to spare and a backpack that was reasonably full, but still light enough and squishable enough that I could fight in it if I had to. It was also carefully sorted to look as sensible as possible at first glance so that I wouldn’t have to answer any difficult questions if Kakashi decided to check our packs - by which I mean I’d hidden the fruit leather, the extra soap, and the potentially extravagant number of socks in carefully chosen pockets and hidey holes to keep them out of harm's way.

Given that he didn’t seem to care whether we had them or not, this was an entirely wasted effort.

“Great,” Tazuna humphed when Kakashi arrived. “A girl, two snot nosed brats, and a guy who can’t even arrive on time. I’m an important man, I need a better quality of service!”

I bristled. A girl? Sakura hit harder than any of the boys in our year. Besides, what was wrong with being a girl? Nothing, that’s what. Even if she didn’t punch like a freight train she'd gone through the same training as everyone else. Also, snot nosed? What were we, four? “Kunoichi have disproportionately high kill rates,” I said, voice as perfectly level and polite as I could make it. “People underestimate them and die for it. Because shinobi are terrifying like that. You should be terrified.”

A hand on my head stopped me, and I scowled as it ruffled my hair in warning. “Ah, what Sasuke meant to say was that I’m an elite jounin of Konohagakure and my team are stronger than they look,” Kakashi corrected mildly. He smiled and dipped his head in a lazy bow. “You’ll be safe under our care, Tazuna-san.”

“I should hope so,” Tazuna said, but his bravado seemed a bit shaken. “I’ve got lives depending on me, you know!”

“Then what are we waiting for, huh?” Naruto bounced on his heels in anticipation. “Let’s go and rescue your village, believe it!”

The fact that Kakashi hadn’t checked our packs still nagged at me, and I wondered briefly if I should get Naruto and Sakura to go through theirs. Sakura’s was small but looked very neat, Naruto’s was old and beaten up and haphazardly stuffed. We’d had the same lessons - I was pretty sure Iruka even made Naruto sit through those ones - so we should have the same things, except that neither of them knew how long this mission was actually going to be…

I decided against. They’d survived on their own packing in canon, and I remembered how badly it had gone down at the academy when I’d started showing people up in class. After almost a month of d-ranks Team Seven was beginning to settle into something vaguely tolerable, I didn’t want to risk disrupting it. It’d be fine.

Besides, Naruto’s excitement was infectious. In a world of military rule, bandits, and a war every generation or so, people just didn’t travel unless they needed to. I doubted he’d ever left the village before - _I_ hadn’t really left the village, and the Uchiha were a powerful clan with trading and business connections to the surrounding areas. Or at least, they had been; I’d not kept them up, so I highly doubted any of the contracts were still valid.

How cool would that be if they were, though. I could be in charge of my own economic empire. Uchiha Sasuke, silk-importer extraordinaire. Purveyor of mochi. I’d have breakfast meetings among the camellias and rewrite Konoha’s employer guidelines to make paid maternity leave a thing. I could have _bespoke stationary._

“You seem to be in a good mood, Sasuke-kun,” Sakura said, walking beside me while Naruto scouted ahead with unnecessary zeal. “Are you looking forward to the mission?”

I resettled myself back into reality. “Just nice to be outside,” I deflected, and continued walking.

And continued walking.

Peeled off from the group to take a leak and admitted that, maybe, there were occasions when the penis was useful.

Continued walking.

Amused myself by using the tree walking technique to stick bits of dust and pebble to the bottom of my shoes as we went, and tried to overpower it at various points to send small dust clouds poofing off my feet.

Continued walking.

Attempted to murder the back of Tazuna’s head with just the force of my thoughts while not letting anything more than a slightly dead-eyed expression cross my face.

_Continued walking._

For _three days._

“This is why people invented trains,” I muttered somewhere around noon on the third day. “And planes. Cars. My kingdom for a renault clio, lord give me strength.”

“What’s that, Sasuke-kun?”

“Carts,” I said, raising my voice just enough for Sakura to hear. “Aren’t they fascinating. Did you ever wonder what it would be like to ride a horse. Think how much faster it would be than this.”

“But Tazuna-san’s a bridge builder,” she pointed out, bemused. “Why would he have a cart? Or a horse?”

“Because the only benefit of feet is that you can go in a straight line instead of following the path, except we’re using our feet and we’re still following the path. It’s slow. And inefficient.” I might have been whining _just a fraction_ by the end of it, but my original estimate of a few days for the trip was apparently way out. We’d gone - what, half the distance so far? Half. In three days! I could _crawl_ faster than this. I was lithe and speedy and built to run, not to slowly amble with breaks every few hours. Escort missions _sucked._

“Are you _tired_ , bastard?” Naruto grinned, dropping back to join the conversation. “Are your feet hurting? Is Hime-chan cold again? Ooh, are you hungry?”

“You think you’re funny but you’re actually not and your attempts at humour are pitiful and embarrassing.”

“ _Are_ you hungry though, Sasuke-kun?” Sakura asked with much more sincerity. “You didn’t eat much last night, and sensei said you skipped the rabbit before that as well.”

Sensei’s a snitch, I thought viciously. “I’m fine,” I said. “I’m just bored. I thought something would have happened by now.” Had we missed the demon brothers? I couldn’t see any reason why we would have. Awfully rude of them though to make us wait this long.

“I know,” Naruto complained, taking the bait. “No bandits, no battles - this is the least heroic c-rank to ever exist!”

“Stop tempting fate, brat!” Tazuna said. “Do you want me to be attacked, huh?”

“Maa, don’t be so impatient, Naruto. This is how most c-ranks are, it’s not bad to have good luck sometimes.” I didn’t jump when Kakashi appeared, but only because I was so used to Naruto’s clones randomly popping up that Kakashi’s barely phased me. I did subtly poke the Kakashi now walking beside us with my chakra, trying to see if I could tell which Kakashi - this one, or the one walking a few metres ahead - was the clone. I couldn’t, of course. Stupid non-chakra sensing chakra sense. Kawarimi sense. Stupid sense.

Tazuna’s sudden strangled silence though was admittedly quite funny.

“Still though,” Kakashi continued. “If you’ve got energy for talking you’ve probably got energy for training. How’s your tree walking going?”

“I can walk up anything sensei, believe it!” Naruto said, already looking round for a suitable forest to demonstrate in. I just stuck my foot to one of the larger stones by the side of the road and lifted the whole thing in answer. Sakura, of course, had mastered it the first time it was introduced.

“I believe you, Naruto, no need to go running off. But I guess your beloved sensei had best teach you something else then, just to keep the boredom away!” He eye smiled at us with his head tilted to the side and waited for both Sakura and Naruto to cheer.

Even I perked up at the thought of a new technique. I could’ve sworn he hadn’t taught them much in canon, but maybe it all happened off screen? We were out the village, there were no stupid test questions to trick us with, I couldn’t see the catch. He might, genuinely, be doing his teaching job and teaching us.

“Fireball,” Naruto demanded, holding his hand out and side-eyeing me. I stuck my tongue out.

“You still need a fire affinity. And you’re still not Uchiha. Get your own technique.” Not that the grand fireball was that much use, anyway. Impressive, but slow to cast, and unless I scored a direct hit it caused more damage to me than to anyone I was fighting. But it was the principle of the thing.

“Funny that you should mention affinities,” Kakashi said, and deposited a leaf in Naruto’s open hand. He tucked Sakura’s behind her ear, and was aiming for the back of my collar before I ducked and stole it from him.

Sakura retrieved hers with a frown and smoothed her hair back out. “But sensei, don’t we need chakra paper to find our affinities?”

He looked up from the book I swear he wasn’t holding a second ago. “Hm, what? Did you say something?”

“Clearly not then,” I said dryly, and turned back to my leaf. Naruto made confused sounds in the background and Sakura started explaining chakra types and how conductive paper would react to different elements, but I tuned them out. I had an advantage over both of them in that I already knew I was a fire and lightning type, so I could focus on making the leaf burn rather than pushing it for an unknown reaction. It would be more delicate than with chakra paper, but easy enough, and I let myself think firey thoughts as I pooled my chakra in my palm.

“Bad Sasuke,” Kakashi said, bopping me on the head with his book. “Stop making it be fire. It might not want to be fire.”

I wrinkled my nose in annoyance. “I’m Uchiha,” I said, because I couldn’t say that I’d seen a variant of my Sasuke-life play out in anime format before I’d died.

He hummed, and for all intents and purposes, ignored me to focus on Icha Icha again. I turned back to my leaf with a frown. If he wanted to be difficult about it then he could be difficult; the leaf would still burn. Unless the lightning would be stronger? But I was pretty sure that came later on. All Uchiha were fire types, or at least the main house were - I think some of the branch members had different elements. They still had to use enough fire jutsu to satisfy the clan though, so it didn’t make much of a difference.

I called my chakra again, letting it flicker to life around the edges of the -

 _Bop._ “Sasuke, no.”

“ _Sensei._ ”

“I did it!” Naruto yelled, holding up his leaf. It was split cleanly in two. “Sensei, sensei, look -”

“Wind,” Kakashi said, ambling over with a pleased smile. “And Sakura, that’s earth. Well done, you two.”

Sakura grinned, eyes sparkling, and even Tazuna gave them a gruff congratulations. I doubt he knew what he was congratulating them for, but it was clearly a big deal so it was nice of him to acknowledge it.

“What did you get, Sasuke-kun?” Sakura asked, and I gave Kakashi a wary look and refocused on my leaf. And, just to prove a point, I carefully cleared all thoughts of anything elemental out of my head and just called my raw chakra, like I did when I gathered it for kawarimi and pushed it out to find something to swap with. Except instead of out, I pushed it _in_ to the leaf, carefully not expecting it to burn so I could act shocked and surprised when it actually _did_ burn.

The leaf crumpled into a soggy mess under the weight of my chakra and I shook my hand out in disgust. “Hang on, I need another leaf. This one broke.”

Kakashi leaned over and stole it from me before I could drop it on the floor. “Hmm, no,” he said. “That’s water chakra, Sasuke. Looks like you’re a water-type!”

And then he smiled at me.

Like he hadn’t just blatantly lied. Or made a mistake. Or - “I have fire chakra,” I corrected him. There was a rushing sound in my ears and I felt faintly light headed. “I use fire jutsu.”

He kept smiling. One of his hands twitched, like he wanted to ruffle my hair but was holding himself back. My chest felt tight, and cold, and dark. My vision narrowed until all I could see was the leaf in his hands, wet and wet and wet and he was speaking again. “Maa, don’t underestimate water, Sasuke. There’s plenty of powerful water-users in the world, and it’s a rare affinity in fire country. Not many people would think to defend against drowning when fighting an Uchiha.”

Because you can’t, because you lose control, because you can’t breathe and then you can’t not breathe and it hurts, you don’t think it would hurt like that but it hurts, it hurts, you can’t breathe you can’t -

“I was planning to be a genjutsu specialist, actually,” I said, my voice flat but otherwise remarkably calm. I blinked, and looked away from the leaf. “Like Sakura said, it’s useful for support.” My shoulders rose and fell in a slow, steady rhythm. There was nothing blocking my nose. I was mildly disappointed to not be following in my family’s tradition as a fire user, but otherwise unbothered.

“Oh, you don’t have to, Sasuke-kun,” Sakura said, sending me an uneasy look. “It was just a thought. You’ll be amazing at whatever you want to be, so you can be a water ninjutsu specialist if you want?”

“No,” I said, and shook myself into my usual grumpy scowl. “Genjutsu makes sense for my skills as well as the team. I’m going to be a genjutsu specialist.”

I was actually relieved when the demon chunin attacked later that afternoon. Demon chunin? Chunin brothers? I didn’t actually care, I just wanted to stab something and they presented an easy target. Puddle on the ground, fab. Kakashi walking on like nothing’s amiss, why not. Sakura frowning at it, Naruto oblivious, perfect set up.

“Sensei,” I said, more as a warning for what I was about to do than anything else. He inclined his head just a fraction and that was good enough for me; I subtly withdrew four shuriken, made sure one of them was attached to a length of chakra wire, and threw them with vicious accuracy.

One thunked into the puddle. The two chunin burst from it in a sudden flurry of chakra, their chains already flying out to wrap around Kakashi. I heard someone’s - Naruto’s? - audible distress and assumed he’d pretended to be ripped to pieces, but I was already moving, running forwards low to the ground to dodge under their blows.

Shurikens two and three curved back, but I’d misjudged the position slightly and only one of them got in a solid hit. Then the chain was swinging my way and I had to twist sharply to avoid it. It would’ve made more sense to back up and get a clear view of what was happening, but like I said, I wanted to stab - I tugged on the wire still in my fist and the last shuriken came whipping back to me.

“Brother!” One of the chunin shouted, and knocked it out of the air with a sharp jab - but that was fine, the wire kept going and scored a deep, bloody groove along his arm, and I took advantage of his moment of pained distraction to aim three lightning fast blows at his throat. He choked, but they did less damage than I’d hoped - he was wearing a head piece, some kind of breathing apparatus - and I had to abandon my attack to roll with a vicious kick from the other chunin, trying desperately to use my momentum to lessen the impact.

“Sasuke, swap!” Sakura demanded, brittle and loud. I growled, but I was badly positioned; one of the chunin was breathing heavily and cradling his wounded arm, and Naruto was distracting the other with a minor avalanche of clones, and I still _really_ wanted to just hit something, but I didn’t have the strength or the run up I needed to deal a finishing blow.

“Punch!” I yelled, and threw myself at the guy I’d winded with my arm raised in a deliberately sloppy haymaker. He scoffed, barely bothering to raise a decent block, and I smirked at him before grabbing Sakura in a kawarimi and trading places. Good luck surviving _that_ without an iron-clad shield in place, dickhead.

I landed closer in than I’d thought, the momentum of my movement sending me sprawling in an untidy shambles on the side of the road. I glanced back at Tazuna - if Sakura was this close to the battle, I needed to check he was guarded because we were still technically on an escort mission rather than a vent-our-feelings-via-stab-therapy mission, but given the sheer quantity of orange surrounding him I guessed he was fine.

Frustratingly, so were Naruto and Sakura, and by the time I’d flipped myself back on my feet they’d both sorted out their respective enemies. Sakura’s was down unconscious with a trickle of blood leaking from under his hairline, and the one Naruto’d been facing was barely more than a head sticking out a truly impressive amount of rope.

Orange rope. With swirly patterns.

“Don’t use clones as rope, dumbass,” I huffed, retrieving my chakra wire and fashioning a more stable solution. “If he stabs it, the whole thing’ll disappear.”

“Don’t run ahead like that,” he snapped back. “What if they’d got you as well as Kakashi-sensei?” He actually sounded upset, face pinched tight and knuckles white around the kunai he was holding.

“They didn’t get Kakashi,” I said.

“They did, Sasuke-kun,” Sakura said, coming up to join us. “We saw -”

“Then where’s his body?” I gestured at the empty path, then the trees off to the left of us. “He’s not dead. He’s over there.”

“But we _saw_ -”

“Sasuke’s right,” Kakashi said, appearing in a whirl of shunshin leaves. “But Sasuke, so’s Naruto. Jumping in like that was reckless.” He nudged one of chunin with his foot, ignoring the man’s angry hiss. “These two are known for using poison. If they’d released it into the air you could easily have breathed it in.”

Yeah, well, they didn’t. And if they did, Kakashi would’ve stopped them, so. We were fine.

“So you’ve heard of us!” the brother currently tied up by Naruto’s clone-rope and my wire said. “Gozu and Meizu, the famous Demon Brothers of the bloody Mist!”

I stepped back and let Kakashi take over the interrogation of both the demon brothers and Tazuna, though I suspected he already knew more than he was letting on. The warning look he shot me though said that he wasn’t happy about how I’d acted, even if he was letting it go for now, and I resisted the urge to hunch my shoulders defensively. From the outside, I could see how it’d looked like I just charged in, particularly given how shaken both Sakura and Naruto had been by Kakashi’s apparent dismemberment.

From the inside, I knew it wasn’t an issue. Kakashi had never been in any danger. The ‘demon brothers’ were small fry, ones that barely registered a mention in canon except as the first proper enemy action Team Seven had seen. Even then, I was pretty sure Naruto was in a worse fight with Mizuki when he was tricked into stealing the scroll. I could’ve acted more like I didn’t know what was happening, but there was a stage, surely, where being paranoid and downplaying my knowledge started working against me? What was the point in having the whole of canon neatly mapped out if I couldn’t use the advantage I’d been given?

“Sasuke-kun?” Sakura prompted, and I flicked my gaze up to her and stopped chewing the inside of my cheek. I replayed the last minute of what everyone had been saying in my head - situational awareness, it’s important for a ninja - and resisted the urge to wrinkle my nose at Tazuna’s hammed up sob story about his grandson.

“It’s outside the mission parameters,” I said neutrally.

“No way, bastard! We’re Team Seven, we don’t abandon people who need us, believe it!”

I pulled a face at Naruto, but I’d already known we were going to continue. “I didn’t say no. If you and Sakura are going, then I am too.”

“Then we’ll go,” Sakura said, turning first to Kakashi for approval then to Tazuna to drop into a formal bow. “We will continue the mission, Tazuna-san, and deliver you safely to Wave.”


	9. Chapter 9

I was on edge for the rest of the day. We all were; now that Tazuna had admitted what was actually going on everyone knew to be cautious - it’s just, I was the only one who knew _how_ cautious we had to be. I was also the only one who knew we’d survive it, but that was beside the point. Anticipation was making me jumpy, and it wasn’t until evening when we reached a small outpost by the river that I allowed myself to relax slightly.

Zabuza had attacked during the day. We were safe, for now. And, as an unexpected but _entirely_ welcome bonus, we got actual fish for dinner with actual rice and actual vegetables instead of trail rations and fresh-caught game.

“We’ll spend the night here,” Tazuna said, frowning out at the river while the lady whose house we were in passed round the bowls. “The water’s too dangerous in the dark, but we can’t risk being seen… It’s foggy around dawn, that’s the best time.”

“Here,” the lady said, adding an extra fish to mine. “You look hungry, shinobi-kun.”

It might have been patronising and I could take offense because I wasn’t _that_ twiggy - or that obvious - but on the other hand, food. “It’s delicious,” I told her. “Thank you for your hospitality.”

She smiled, and turned to Tazuna. “Will you need futons, Tazuna-san? I have a spare, and I’m sure more can be found for your retinue.”

 _Retinue,_ Naruto mouthed at Sakura, looking pleased.

“No need,” Kakashi assured her. “My team and I will keep watch.”

She hesitated. “If Gato sees I have guards on the house…”

“We’re ninja, Obasan. We won’t be seen.”

She looked back at the three of us dubiously - Naruto, currently pulling a face at Sakura while she pretended to ignore him, me half way through my third bowl of dinner - but Tazuna caught her eye and nodded. He’d seen us in action, and though I still think he thought of us as kids, he’d also seen us fight.

We set out our rolls far enough from the house to be invisible but close enough to still guard it. Kakashi disappeared into the shadows after telling us to set up a watch rotation, probably to set up his own patrol just in case we missed anything. It would leave him tired the next morning, but ninja were expected to operate under worse conditions than a bit of missing sleep. Of the rest of us, I drew the short straw and ended up with the middle watch, Sakura took the first, and Naruto would take the watch just before dawn. Sakura took to the trees to settle herself and Naruto and I crawled in our sleeping rolls and bedded down.

Say what you like about ninja life, but the ability to drop almost immediately into a fully restful sleep? Genius. A plus, ten out of ten would recommend. Having to crawl out of the lovely warmth and into the freezing chill of the mists that hung around the river in the middle of the night? _Pants._

I shamelessly stole Naruto’s orange jacket. The immolation jutsu could go hang.

No, I wasn’t still sore about not being a fire user, nor was I quietly panicking about what effect the change would have on canon. How dare you.

“Hey,” I greeted, landing silently on the branch next to Sakura. “All quiet?”

“All quiet,” she agreed in the same low tone. She raised an eyebrow at my jacket, but didn’t comment. I’d give it back to Naruto when he switched on for the dawn watch. Probably. It was surprisingly soft.

She didn’t make a move to leave though, and I cocked my head curiously. “Bed roll’ll be getting cold,” I said.

She nodded, then shook her head and turned to face me fully. “Sasuke-kun,” she said cautiously, “Why weren’t you eating?”

I frowned. “I had three bowls at dinner.”

“Before that though. And don’t say you weren’t hungry, because you wouldn’t have had so much tonight if that was true.”

I burrowed further into the jacket, disguising my hunched shoulders as a reaction to the cold. I didn’t want to straight up lie, and deflecting would be obvious, so I admitted, “I don’t eat meat.”

“Oh. I didn’t know you were religious, Sasuke-kun?”

“I’m not. I just…” I didn’t know how to explain. Being vegetarian - or pescatarian - by choice wasn’t really a thing, particularly not in a ninja village. At the same time, I thought I’d done remarkably well to suppress the - weakness was the wrong word, softness, maybe? The softness of my old life as much as I had. I could throw shuriken with the best of them, had successfully desensitised myself to the _concept_ of death and dead bodies, but I just… didn’t want to eat them. Dead things.

Fish didn’t count because I needed protein, fish meat didn’t _look_ the same, and also fuck fish.

Sakura was still waiting for an explanation. “People are made of meat,” I said, and shrugged. If she wanted to try and talk me out of it, or explain why it was impractical and going hungry could put the mission at risk, she could try. I already knew the arguments though. Remember that year I spent giving myself malnutrition? I remembered it.

But all she said was, “Ah. Thank you for telling me, Sasuke-kun,” and turned to go.

“Wait,” I said, taken aback. “That’s it? Why did you want to know?”

She hesitated, one foot already sticking to the bark in preparation for her climb down. “Well, I’m the team leader, aren’t I? And if I’m the team leader, that means I’m responsible for you and Naruto while we’re on missions. So, it’s good to know that you need fish, and I can make sure you aren’t hungry.” She flashed me a smile. “Kakashi-sensei’s right, Sasuke-kun. You get grumpy when you’re hungry.”

And then she gave me a small wave, and dropped down to the camp. I was left staring at the darkness, completely thrown by the fact that my twelve year old teammate had just assumed responsibility for me - _me,_ the adult masquerading as a child - and that she’d been so weirdly understanding about it.

“I honestly don’t know what to feel about this,” I told the tree I was leaning against. It was probably best to ignore it and concentrate on being on watch.

Oh, except, I wasn't grumpy when I was hungry. That was slander and libel and Kakashi was an ass for spreading his filthy filthy lies. I was grumpy all the time, it was a personality trait.

The boat ride over the river the next morning was eerie. It was just after dawn, and the light was filtering weak and grey through the mist. It was cold - of course - and so still and silent that I was reminded sharply of the quiet not-dark between my old world and Itachi’s Tsukuyomi. We didn’t even make any sound as we moved, the boat driver (driver? Helmsman?) opting to use a long pole to push us along rather than risking oars. The occasional bird call or splash of a fish breaking the surface seemed to echo terrifyingly loud off the unseen river bank.

It made the hairs on my arms stand on end.

We pulled up a short way from the village itself, not daring to risk getting any closer by boat. Tazuna said something to the man that had brought us over, something changed hands, and with a final nod, we left. He poled back out over the water without looking back and it took barely a minute before the mist closed behind him and he was gone.

“We’re a few hours from the village,” Tazuna told us. “My house is on the outskirts, we’ll be safe there.”

It was a shortsighted belief, but we didn’t disabuse him of the notion. If a ninja wanted him dead, his front door wouldn’t present much of a barrier - though, I suppose, his house would be easier for us to defend than the public roads we’d been taking so far.

The promise of a shorter day and an end to the journey made us move that bit faster though. I kept looking at the trees, then reminding myself that Zabuza was a mist nin, he’d most likely be coming from the river we were following - except, Haku had been in the trees - but then the river was more dangerous -

By the time Naruto flung his kunai at the bushes I was on a hair trigger, and it was only worry that my kawarimi sense would be detectable that had kept me from saturating the entire path in my chakra.

 _Rabbit,_ I thought, trying to calm my racing nerves as Sakura scolded Naruto. It was just a rabbit. A white rabbit. Wasn’t there something - “It’s a decoy,” I hissed, grabbing Tazuna and dragging him to the ground with me. “Get down!”

The sword whistled as it passed overhead. My heart pounded, because holy shit, this was it - also _holy shit,_ that was close.

“I see the other two failed,” a deep voice said. I looked up; the sword - bloody fuck, that’s a big a sword - was embedded horizontally in a tree, and Zabuza stood on top of it in a faux-disinterested slouch. “Tch, now it’s my turn.”

“Momochi Zabuza,” Kakashi said, mimicking his casual attitude. “The demon of the hidden mist.” His book was nowhere to be seen though, and I recognised the tenseness in his shoulders.

Which was ridiculous, because this was Kakashi. Yes, he’d give himself chakra exhaustion in this fight, but also, _he was Kakashi._ He was probably worried we were going to do something stupid and get in the way. Escort quests were the worst for multiple reasons, and the lack of any self preservation on the part of the people you had to keep alive ranked pretty high on that list.

“Stay back,” I said to the others as we pushed ourselves to our feet. “We need to protect Tazuna.”

Sakura shot me an annoyed look, even as she and Naruto fell into an automatic defensive formation. “Naruto, clones,” she said. “Sasuke, get high up and use your shuriken -”

“No,” Kakashi cut in. “He’s too dangerous. Keep out of it - I’ll handle him.” His hand went to his headband, and I couldn’t see from where I was but it didn’t take a genius to guess what he’d just revealed.

Particularly because Zabuza raised an eyebrow and narrated it. “Sharingan no Kakashi. I’m honored that I get to see it already. But what good will your eye be against an enemy that you can’t see, I wonder?” He held up one hand in a seal and faded back into the mist that was rising off the river. No - not rising off it, being _pulled_ off it.

Incidentally, one handed wordless jutsus? Beyond cool. If I hadn’t spontaneously decided to forsake ninjutsu in favour of never using a water jutsu in my life, I’d be all over that.

“Close ranks,” Sakura hissed, backing up a step. She blocked Tazuna to the front, Naruto and I took his left and right respectively, and I heard the quiet sound of Naruto’s clones appearing to cover the back. The mist was by this stage so thick that Kakashi was little more than a silhouette, and I stretched out with my kawarimi-sense to get a better look. I couldn’t pick up any chakra, but physical objects showed up, kind of like if you walked around with your eyes closed and your hands out in front of you. Not the easiest thing to interpret without being able to see what you feeling, but it would give me a warning if -

_There._

I spun, lifting my arm to deflect Zabuza’s sword away with a palm strike. He twisted the blade and angled it back at me and I aimed a kick at his wrist to disrupt the blow - it was way too powerful to even think about blocking, I had shuriken and a few kunai and the sword was taller than I was and probably weighed more as well. His next blow was angled straight for my chest but he dissolved into a splash of water before I could react, Kakashi appearing behind him with his kunai thrust out exactly where the clone’s head would’ve been.

“With my eye I can see everything you do, Zabuza,” he growled. “There’s nowhere you can hide.”

“Oh?” came the response, echoing from all around us - then Kakashi was sliced in half, and this time I did flinch because _shit_ \- then the clone dispersed into water, and another Kakashi held his kunai against Zabuza’s neck.

“I can copy your techniques as soon as you use them,” the new Kakashi said. “Anything you use will be used against you in turn until your own weapons defeat you.”

It was melodramatic to the extreme, but it was also playing out as canon said it would and provided a decent distraction for the three of us to try and hustle Tazuna away from the river and out of the thickest of the mist. I kept my kawarimi sense in close to watch for any more attacks - though with the number of Narutos now circling us protectively, I wasn’t sure I’d be able to pick up anything useful - so I had to rely on hearing for Kakashi and Zabuza’s fight.

“Which way is the village,” Sakura hissed to Tazuna. “We can get out while Kakashi distracts him. Naruto, can your clones make a -”

The mist cleared and she cut off with shocked gasp. I zeroed in on what she’d seen instantly: Zabaza, standing on the river a metre back from the bank with one hand out, holding Kakashi in place with a sphere of water.

“It seems your eye has let you down, Kakashi,” he said, in the tone of voice you might say _it seems your geraniums are in need of weeding, Kakashi._ “My water prison is inescapable whether you see it or not.”

“Kakashi-sensei,” Naruto said frantically. “What do we do, how do we get him out?”

“No!” Kakashi yelled from inside the bubble. “Take Tazuna and escape, you can’t face him!”

“Can’t face me, can’t escape me,” Zabuza agreed with a chilling laugh, and raised one hand in a single-handed seal again. The water clone rose ominously from the surface of the river and started walking towards us with slow, measured steps, and I knew - I still _knew_ that we were going to be fine, but Kakashi’s fear and Zabuza’s lazy confidence were both very convincing.

“What do we do,” Naruto hissed at Sakura. “What do we _do?_ ”

She wavered, white-faced, knuckles standing out in sharp relief against the handle of her kunai. Her eyes were darting furiously, looking for an exit, and I had a sudden doubt - academy training said the mission was paramount, the textbook answer would be to obey Kakashi’s order and run, she wasn’t going to do it, was she?

“We can’t leave Kakashi,” I said, readying more shuriken and priming two of them with poison.

“Those who abandon their teammates are less than trash,” she agreed without missing a beat, and I realised she’d just been looking for a plan. “I think the Zabuza on the river can’t move without releasing Kakashi-sensei. Naruto, can your clones defend Tazuna?”

He shook his head. “His sword is too fast! He’ll dispel them, I can’t, we can’t -”

“Focus,” I snapped. The water bunshin was closer, still taking lazy strides with its sword balanced casually over one shoulder. It was _toying_ with us - or with Kakashi, who was throwing himself against the water prison with what looked like a drill whirling ineffectively around his hands. I tilted my shoulders to hide my mouth and hissed, quietly enough that Zabuza shouldn’t hear me, “Naruto, we need you. I can’t swap with a moving shuriken, it’s too small.”

Sakura sucked in a sharp breath as she understood and she nodded once decisively. “Delay the water clone. I’ll take it. Naruto, stay on guard and keep making clones.” And, without giving him any more time to panic, she lowered herself to the ground, sent out a trio of illusion bunshins to disguise which path she’d taken, and started running. I waited just long enough for Naruto to collect himself and press a henged clone into my palm before leaping forwards, circling wide enough to stay out of reach and flinging shuriken in quick succession. I focused on the water clone, the poisoned shuriken going first - elemental clones could take more hits than shadow clones could, but the poison would contaminate the water and should disrupt it enough to give Sakura a chance - and the henged one held in reserve until I could get the angle _just right -_

Clone Zabuza ducked to one side to dodge Sakura’s punch, and I threw the Naruto-shuriken. It whizzed over his shoulder, close enough that he dismissed it as a failed throw, and continued past the original Zabuza until it was hanging over the lake. I was reaching for it with kawarimi even before it de-henged into Naruto, yet more shuriken flying the second I switched - now would have been a _really good time_ to have a quick-fire flame attack but I had to make do with what I had and at least my aim was damn good. Zabuza was forced to dodge or take three inches of spiky metal to his carotid artery; he dodged, and I had a second of hanging in the air above the river while I reached back to the bank to switch again, then I was plummeting down just as I hooked onto another of Naruto’s clones. I took a breath, lining up my next shot for when I was back on land, and -

The kunai slammed into my side out of nowhere and disrupted my concentration enough that I lost my grip on the clone I was switching with. I cursed, reaching frantically for another one, but I hit the water in the next second and lost kawarimi entirely. The force of the impact rippled through me like a shock, sudden and cold and stinging, and I turned desperately to find the surface.

It wasn’t there.

I kicked, pushing my arms out and sweeping them through the water. I couldn’t have fallen far, and Kakashi would be free now, all I had to do was get back to air, all I _had to do_ was not breathe until I could breathe again. I wasn’t a civilian, I reminded myself, it wasn’t like before, I wasn’t going to - it wasn’t - The river pressed against my chest; I forced out kawarimi with a panicked surge, but you can’t switch places through solid objects and the water was an immovable barrier, I kicked again and this time I moved, fingers scrabbling for the surface but instead I felt them sink into the mud at the bottom of the river, I’d swum the wrong way I couldn’t breathe, canon-Sasuke survived this fight but I was _drowning_ I couldn’t breathe, my lungs were on fire I pushed off from the bottom of the river I didn’t know which way was up I couldn’t breathe there was water pressing against my nose I had to breathe I couldn’t breathe I had to breathe it flooded in I choked I choked I was going to drown I couldn’t _breathe -_

A hand gripped the back of my collar and hauled me up, coughing and wheezing to the surface. I flailed, trying instinctively to get a grip on them even as my ribs ached from the kunai wound and throwing up the water I’d swallowed, but they kept me at arms’ reach until I was on the bank.

“Easy,” they murmured, supporting my shoulders as I shook. I gasped, huge gulps of air rattling through me and scraping my windpipe raw as they went. “Easy, you’re ok.”

They tensed suddenly, and I looked up, too exhausted to panic. Was it Zabuza, had he got free of Kakashi - I blinked stupidly at the white and red patterned mask. That wasn’t one of my teammates. What. What?

“I have to go,” they said with an apologetic head tilt, and in the same movement they leant me against the closest tree and disappeared in a shunshin. I was too shaken to protest, leaning back against the trunk in an ungainly sprawl and trying to remind my muscles how to function. Distantly, I registered the sudden stillness as a ninja battle I hadn’t even noticed hearing ground to a sudden halt, then voices - Kakashi, and the unknown masked ninja who’d saved me.

Oh. Oh, god.

I pulled myself to my feet. The kunai wound was a nasty cut, but it had missed anything vital. I was lucky. Both that it hadn’t been a direct hit, and that… That Haku had pulled me out in time.

Oh god. I almost died. Again. If Haku hadn’t saved me I would’ve -

I pressed my arm against my ribs to keep the blood inside and shook my head to clear it. I needed to get back to the others; they were just the other side of the bushes, and I could already hear Naruto shouting my name.

“I’m here,” I said, pushing my way through the foliage. “Jeez, chill. I’m fine.”

“Bastard, what the hell! Where did you _go_?”

“You’re bleeding,” Kakashi said bluntly. I twisted to the side and lifted my arm away to show him the wound. Sakura gasped something that was probably my name, but looking at it again, I didn’t actually think the cut was that bad. If it hadn’t ended up with me in the water, I’d be fine.

“No organs,” I said, in the least professional status update anyone ever gave. “I don’t think anything’s broken.”

“Ah,” Kakashi said, pocketing his kunai and smiling. “That’s good, then.” And, still smiling - or eye-smiling, at least - he gently toppled over and crashed to the floor.

“Kakashi-sensei!” Naruto and Sakura yelped. I blinked at him. Oh, yeah. That.

“Naruto, can your clones make something to carry him to the village?” I asked.

“We can’t move him! What if he’s dying?”

I prodded him with a finger of chakra, just in case he’d been injured worse than in canon. After all, Sasuke was meant to come out fine but I’d almost - “He’s fine,” I said, refusing to complete the thought. “Chakra exhaustion. Sharingans are for Uchiha. He’s not Uchiha so it doesn’t like him, that’s all.”

Yeah. That sounded like a perfect explanation. Fab.

I made a squeaked sound of surprise as someone hauled me up into a piggyback, and it took an embarrassingly long moment to recognise the someone as Naruto, and then to realise that I was being carried by a clone. “Hey, put me down,” I said, hitting it hard enough on the shoulder to dispel it. It stayed stubbornly undispelled, so either it was the real one or I was being pathetic. “I’m fine. Put me down.”

“We don’t have time,” Sakura said. She secured the last orange tie holding Kakashi onto his own clone chauffeur and looked back over my shoulder. “Tazuna-san, we need to hurry. Which way to your house?”

He pointed, wide eyed but remarkably undamaged and composed for a civilian who’d just been on the edge of a jounin level fight, and Sakura nodded at the various Narutos around her.

“Hang on, bastard,” the one holding me said, and I grit my teeth and accepted my ignoble defeat.

It gave me time to concentrate on not freaking out over how badly I’d almost disrupted the story by _~~nearly dying~~_ not following the script, so. Win.

Thank god for Sakura. She was an amazing human being, a beautiful shining example of ninjaing done right, and making her the team leader was the best thing I ever did for Team Seven. Arriving at Tazuna’s house, handling introductions, setting out a watch rotation - which I only had to fight a little to get included on, I only had a minor stab wound, that’s _all that had happened_ \- all of these things were basic procedure we’d been taught at the academy, and she thrived on it. Basic procedure, plus a bit of basic manners and social awareness, both of which Naruto and I were somewhat lacking in.

“How are you so good at this?” I asked when the three of us - two of us and a Naruto clone, he was on watch at the moment - were left alone in one of the upstairs rooms to settle in. My voice sounded odd to my ears, forcefully cheerful in a way that betrayed how much effort it was taking to act like everything was fine. Which it was. I was alive, and Kakashi was alive, and Sakura was leading like a pro and even in my thoughts I was bubbly and upbeat and _fine_.

“Good at what?” Naruto asked. He dug through the packs he’d retrieved at some point and brought with him and passed me his very minimal first aid kit. I wrinkled my nose and didn’t take it.

“My one’s in my bag, it’s got more things in it. And Sakura, being good at all this… missioning. With Tazuna and Tsunami.”

She shot me a harried look. “I’m terrified,” she said, too stressed to be anything but blunt. “Kakashi-sensei’s completely out of it, you’re hurt, _I’m_ hurt, we don’t know if anyone else is coming after us and I’m the team leader so I have to be responsible and I don’t know what I’m doing and I’m going to do it wrong but I have to do it anyway and I’m just, really, really under a lot of pressure at the moment.”

Oh. My stubborn good mood cracked and I felt guilty, suddenly, for relying on her and not noticing how hard she was finding it. She was twelve, remember. This was her first c-rank and she shouldn’t be on it - she should’ve been sent home the moment Tazuna revealed that there were more enemy nin coming after him. We all should’ve been. If I hadn’t been so caught up in following the path canon laid out then maybe I would’ve stopped to consider that before blithely agreeing to continue.

“You’re hurt?” Naruto asked, homing in on the important statement. “What - Sakura-chan, why didn’t you say? Where? How bad is it?” He tossed me my first aid kit and started digging through Sakura’s own bag for hers, completely upsetting the neat organisation of her stuff as he did so.

“No, not - not badly,” she said, reaching over to pull the bag out of his reach. “I just punched too hard. My shoulder aches, it’s not actually hurt. I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said that.” She took a deep breath and let it out again slowly. “I’m fine.”

“I have a heat pack,” I offered. Taking painkillers while still on duty was risky, it was far too easy to ignore your limits and turn a minor injury into a major one, but heat packs were safe enough. And I almost wanted to reason that we wouldn’t be attacked again until Zabuza had recovered, but… But. Think about that later, we’re helping Sakura at the moment. “And you are good at it. We should’ve realised you were stressed, but I don’t think you have to worry about doing it wrong.”

She shot me a small smile as Naruto nodded frantically in the background. “Thanks, Sasuke-kun. I’m ok. I’m… I hope Kakashi-sensei wakes up soon, is all.”

And that was about my limit of feelings for one conversation, so I said an awkward, “Yeah, me too,” and pulled my torn shirt over my head to end the conversation. It was only when I heard Sakura’s muffled _eep_ that I remembered that taking my shirt off involved being _undressed_ in _company_ and I tried to angle myself away to hide how red my ears were when I emerged. Aborting and redressing would have been worse - also, wet clothes - so I continued with my original plan and inspected the tear as though nothing was wrong. It was a pretty clean cut, I should be able to sew it back together without any problem. Well, no, it was full of river (don’t think) and bits of blood, but that would wash out, and the important thing was that the fabric was tough enough that it hadn’t frayed and wouldn’t need a massive patch to fix it.

As for the actual cut on the side of my chest… It wasn’t that bad. Butterfly plasters would hold it, which was good; I had no problem sewing my shirt up but I didn’t fancy sewing _me_ up. After that, I’d just have to be careful rotating my torso and maybe rely on my right arm for a bit to give my left side a rest. I hesitated, one hand pressed against it, then grit my teeth. “Naruto, can you help me with the bandage? I can’t reach.”

“Um, I can try,” he said. “You just tie it in a knot, right?”

I stared. Sakura stared. “You’re lucky you have a healing factor,” I said, and shook my head. It was only a chest. Boy chest. Boys went shirtless all the time. “Sakura, can you help me with the bandage?”

“Yes!” she squeaked, ridiculously high pitched and ridiculously red in the face. I huffed and gave Naruto my best bitch face.

“Learn first aid,” I commanded.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Kakashi: where the hell is Sasuke i need to end this fight and save him  
> Zabuza: where the hell is Haku i need him to end this fight and save me
> 
> Also, side note that Sakura is actually thirteen at this point. Sasuke on the other hand is twelve, and has put the other two squarely as “similar age but obviously younger than me because i’m an adult right” so. Everyone's twelve. Y'know.


	10. Chapter 10

I stole Naruto’s jacket again for my watch that night. He didn’t say anything, too busy crawling into the futon I’d just vacated and dropping into an exhausted sleep after his own stint on lookout. Maybe we should slow down on abusing his clones - he was, technically, covering three times as many shifts as we were, and even though it looked effortless from the outside to make clones and keep them active for hours on end, neither Sakura nor I really knew what it was costing him. He had a lot of chakra, true, but wasn’t there also a mental component involved?

I rested my chin on my knees and stared out from my perch on the roof of the house. Maybe. I didn’t know. I hadn’t known all that much about the Naruto world to begin with, and I’d muddled in far too much fanon with my canon to really trust myself on the finer details. It’s why I was hesitant to act too much on my former knowledge and try and change things, at least in part.

Well, no, that sounds far too honourable and sensible. I wasn’t acting on my former knowledge because I was scared people would see I wasn’t who I was meant to be, and because the closer I followed the script the more assurance I’d have that I, and to a lesser extent everyone around me, would survive.

Except… I nearly hadn’t. I’d known what was coming, I’d done what I thought canon-Sasuke did, and I’d nearly died because I wasn’t good enough to pull it off. I’d changed some things, sure; we were tree walking earlier than we should be, Sakura was team leader and Naruto was using clones with a casualness that I didn’t think he originally had, I was slotting into a different role than canon-Sasuke’s _lone hero carries the team_ mentality would have allowed for. We still came to Wave, though. Still faced the demon chunin brothers or whatever they were called, Kakashi still took Zabuza down with his sharingan and fainted of chakra exhaustion afterwards.

But I’d nearly died. I didn’t have the fire jutsu I was meant to have. I wasn’t even fire, what kind of failed Uchiha did that leave me as? I’d freaked out when I went underwater and needed rescuing - by an _enemy_. If Haku wasn’t so soft hearted, would the others have found me in time? I thought Kakashi was invincible. He didn’t leave teammates behind. He wasn’t meant to let me almost drown.

I shivered, and sent out another sweep of kawarimi chakra. I needed to get better at identifying the things I felt with it; at the moment I could pick up the roof, the outline of the house and what I knew to be a raised balcony at the back, and an uneven mostly-flat terrain around it. The still patch that gave slightly when I pressed it was probably water, and the oddly spiky thing that I accidentally knocked over was… a branch? A potted plant? Without being able to see it to confirm, I wasn’t sure.

I wanted to assure myself that we wouldn’t be attacked, not until Zabuza recovered and staged his dramatic last stand on the bridge, but. Relying on canon just wasn’t as appealing anymore. My plot armour was flimsier than I thought. Realistically, we should never have come to Wave - Kakashi should probably have turned us back when the mission rating went up, and even if he hadn’t, I should’ve. Zabuza was a surprise to everyone else, but he wasn’t a surprise to me. I should’ve known better.

And _Haku._ He saved me. What was I meant to say to that? Thank you for my life, allow me to introduce you to my sensei, he’s going to stick a ball of lightning through your chest and then stand back while your whatever Zabuza is to you goes and commits suicide by mob out of grief? I couldn’t. Could I? I’d had vague ideas about swooping in and saving the day, sure, anyone who’s watched Naruto knows that those two got the short end of the stick and probably didn’t deserve dying like that, but we were _ninja._ People died all the time. Having enemies remove themselves from the equation was a good thing, it meant less people around trying to remove you.

But Haku hadn’t let me die. I buried myself deeper in Naruto’s jacket, taking advantage of the fact that it was too broad across the shoulder. The orange was oddly comforting. What would Naruto do? It was his story.

He’d save them both. That wasn’t a fair question.

What would I do? If the series was called Sasuke instead of Naruto? It was Naruto’s story in canon, but this was my self insert. I’d been doing a pretty shitty job of being a hero so far, but… what would I do?

It took four days for Kakashi to recover. Chakra exhaustion wasn’t a common thing, particularly not among genin, so none of us knew exactly how to treat it and it was something of a relief when he finally blinked himself awake.

Also, sponge baths. I was tempted to leave him as he was because he’d almost let me drown, but at the same time, ergh. Not that the sponge bath itself was much less ergh. I avoided looking as much as possible and mostly concentrated on getting the river out his hair and ensuring that he wasn’t in danger of bed sores - I had no idea how long it took them to develop, but I knew they were a thing and if my grandma was to be believed (which she was, in all things) then they were a thing that sucked ass, so. Also, speaking of hair, I totally called it. Split ends _everywhere._

Anyway, it was a relief when he woke up and started hobbling his own self round on crutches. It was even a relief to hear him praise Sakura for her caution in keeping permanent surveillance going, even if the way he laid out that Zabuza was still alive was fairly ominous.

“You can do that with senbon?” Sakura asked, leaning forwards on the rock she was sat on. We were down by the river, far enough away from anyone who might overhear that we could talk freely about the mission. “How come they aren’t taught in the academy?”

“Putting someone into a fake-death state is dangerous,” he cautioned. “If your senbon is slightly too deep or if it’s thrown at the wrong angle, or if your target moves in a way you didn't predict, you could either kill them or not affect them at all.”

“That’s true of everything, though,” I pointed out. “We’re ninja, we deal with dangerous all the time. If it’s a useful skill, we should know how to use it.”

He raised an eyebrow. “There aren’t many in Konoha who use senbon,” he said, “And those that do are usually kunoichi.”

I scowled. Really? “I’m good at throwing things,” I huffed. “Screw your gender norms. Teach me.”

“Ah, Sasuke, you misunderstand. I can’t teach you because I don’t know how, not because I don’t want to.” He smiled, leaning forwards on his crutch and making a move to mess up my hair. Thankfully, he was still slow and invalided, and I took shameless advantage by dodging out of reach. “Your disregard for - what did you say? _Gender norms_ is cute though. No wonder all the ladies love you!”

“I liked you better when you were unconscious,” I said, then startled as his clone got my hair from behind. Seriously, wasn’t he meant to be recovering from exhaustion? Why was he wasting chakra on a shadow clone just to mess with me. _Why._

“Maa, but I do need to teach you something though. Listen up, kids!” 

Naruto and Sakura practically sprang to attention.

“Is it a jutsu?” Naruto asked. “We know our elements now, you have to teach us a really cool wind jutsu, believe it! And,” he added hastily, looking back at me and Sakura, “And earth jutsu ‘n water jutsu. Believe it!”

No. No water jutsu. Genjutsu. Piss off.

“It’s a jutsu technique,” Kakashi said. “Similar to tree climbing, and one that you’ll find very useful while we’re here. Watch.” He hobbled over to the edge of the river, then bypassed the path and kept going straight over the water. Interestingly, it wasn’t just his sandals that stood on the surface like a solid object, but also the feet of his crutches. Was he directing his chakra through the wood? Or creating a separate disk of it just to cover where the crutches hit the water and holding it unconnected to his body?

“Water walking,” he said once he was a good metre or two out from the bank. “The same as tree climbing, except instead of using your chakra to stick to things, you need to expel it in a constant stream from your feet to push yourself off the water.”

“But Sensei, won’t pushing the water just move it aside and make you sink?” Sakura asked, frowning as she tried to work out the mechanics.

“If you push too hard, yes - it’s very easy to get water walking wrong and fall in, and you’ll probably all do that multiple times today.” He tilted his head and smiled, and I got a bad feeling. “Which is why, before anyone tries water walking, I want you all to demonstrate to me that you can swim.”

The bad feeling crystalised into a lead weight in my stomach. No. I couldn’t. No, that was a lie, I could swim - I used to be good at it, I used to love it, I used to be a confident swimmer and take risks I really shouldn’t have taken and that was the whole _problem_ \- but there was a big difference between ‘can swim’ and ‘can hold off panicking long enough not to drown’ and, just at the moment, I really didn’t want to.

“Of course we can swim!” Naruto protested. “We’re ninja, Kakashi-sensei. We can all _swim._ ”

“Sasuke?” Kakashi asked, looking at me steadily. He wasn’t even bothering to wait for Sakura’s response. He _knew_ I was the only one likely to have trouble. Had he seen my spectacular failure while we were fighting Zabuza? If he had, why hadn’t he rescued me?

A sudden thought gripped me. What would he do if I said no? Being able to fight on or near water was probably a basic ninja requirement. Can hold a kunai, can follow orders, can manage not to freak out at the first sign of wet - he’d already seen me reject ninjutsu because I wasn’t a fire type. My faults were piling up, and I wasn't like Lee, I couldn’t claim to be strong enough in other areas to make up for them.

What use was a sharingan to someone too weak to be a ninja? No use. Poor distribution of resources. Likely to be remedied post haste. Even if Kakashi was more worried about me putting the other two at risk, being benched would still be a death sentence for me.

“I can swim,” I said, tilting my chin up in challenge.

His shoulders dropped a fraction and his mouth thinned. I could see it through the mask. Either I knew him better, or he wasn’t bothering to hide his expressions as much as he used to. I set my jaw and refused to back down. “You wanted a demonstration, right? I can demonstrate. Where do you want me to swim to?”

“Sasuke,” he said tiredly, and I channeled all my fear into being blindingly angry. I pulled off my shirt in sharp, jerky movements, throwing it roughly behind me so at least one thing would remain dry, and strode out to the river. I could swim. I could be shirtless. I could do anything.

“Where do you want me to swim to, sensei?” I repeated. The water hit my sandals, soaking my socks, then up to hems of my trousers and above my knees. It was cold. It was cold, it was wet, I was _fucked_ if I’d let it stop me. I pushed against the resistance and kept walking.

“Sasuke, stop.” His gaze darted down to the bandages still round my chest and I swear he winced. “I know you can’t swim.”

“You don’t know shit -”

“I know that being stuck underwater is your worst fear. It’s what you saw when I used the hell-viewing genjutsu on you. I know that it’s rare for a main-branch Uchiha to be a water-type, and I know that sufficiently traumatic experiences happening to someone with a still developing chakra system can influence how their chakra turns out. I know what it looks like when things haven’t healed, even if there’s nothing visible from the outside.” I flinched at each accusation, one step away from crossing my arms defensively and hunching in to protect myself. “And, Sasuke, I know how dangerous it can be to keep things secret.”

“You don’t know shit,” I repeated miserably. Hatake Suppress-my-trauma-till-it-nearly-kills-me Kakashi, lecturing someone on keeping secrets. How _did_ those years hiding in ANBU turn out for you, sensei? What was it, three hours a day you spend moping over the memorial stone? Four? Fuck off and leave me alone.

“What I don’t know is why,” he continued as if I hadn’t spoken. “And if you don’t tell me, then I can’t help you.” And if he couldn’t fix me, then I was done. I got it. I grit my teeth and stared at the water clinging round my waist and didn’t answer.

“Sasuke, please,” he said quietly. “If you won’t talk to me, then talk to someone. Sakura. Naruto. Anyone.”

“We won’t tell anyone else,” Sakura said, and I did hunch in on myself then. I’d forgotten she was there.

“Yeah, bastard. You can count on us,” Naruto chimed in. “Because we’re a team, right? We’ll look after you.”

“I don’t need looking after,” I bit out, but even I could admit it was a pathetic attempt. I was half underwater, wet, friggin _cold_ and what was visible of me was either naked or bandaged. I couldn’t even look at them. Any second now Naruto would crack out his therapy no jutsu and I’d be converted, spilling my deepest fears in a dramatic, flash-back filled monologue while mournful music played in the background. It was inevitable, and all my resentment at Kakashi for pushing me to this point suddenly switched to Naruto.

I didn’t _want_ to be another stepping stone on his path to becoming a great hero. My life wasn’t a character development opportunity for someone else. Fuck that. If I was going to be humiliated like this, it should at least happen on my terms.

I looked up from the water to glare at Naruto and straightened my shoulders. “I died,” I said bluntly. “My brother killed me. He killed my whole clan, I wasn’t special. The only difference was he held me in a genjutsu when he did it so it didn’t stick.” Someone made a wounded noise and I ignored them and kept talking. “It’s called Tsukuyomi. One second in the real world is three days in the genjutsu world, and he had complete control. He looped it, and I watched him kill everyone, and then he stabbed me and I drowned and it started again.” Naruto was white-faced, mouth dropping open in shock. I wanted to keep going, to twist the knife deeper - you wanted me to talk? Then _listen_ \- but I broke off with a disgusted _tch_ and shifted my gaze to Kakashi instead.

“I can swim. I need to learn water walking. If you want to help, great. Teach me. Otherwise I’m fine.”

He closed his eye, leaning heavily on his crutches and looking pained. How dare he, I thought. How dare - who the hell gave him the right? It was my life. I lived it. Even if it wasn’t meant to be my life it was now. No one ever bothered to care before, they just abandoned me in my creepy murder house and was it any _pissing wonder_ that the original Sasuke went batshit and tried to desert and kill them all, _I_ was going to desert just as soon as Itachi was in range and everyone else could go fuck themselves and leave me to it.

“Ok,” I said when he didn’t answer. I nodded, and took a step back. My sandals had sunk into the bottom of the river while I’d been standing there, and I nearly stumbled as the mud tugged back on them. “Ok. No worries. See you later.”

“Sasuke, wait -”

I grabbed a stone from the edge of the river and switched places with it, pausing just long enough to pick up my shirt from the ground and pull it over my head. “Hope the water walking goes well,” I told Sakura and Naruto without looking at them, and used another kawarimi to pull myself blindly into the forest. I landed up a tree, next to a splintered area of the trunk where I’d apparently just ripped off a branch, and dropped straight into a loping run through the canopy towards where Naruto’s clone was on watch.

“Hey, bastard!” he greeted cheerfully. “What happened to you? Why’re you all wet?”

I threw a shuriken in answer and dispelled him, then settled myself into a tightly huddled crouch in the tree fork he’d been sitting in. I didn’t want to think. I didn’t want to talk to anyone. I wanted to sit here on watch and spread out my chakra as far as it could go and try to work out if the moving things I sensed were squirrels, sparrows, or really small enemy ninja.

I wanted to go home and cry on someone. I wanted my grandma. I wanted my brother. I wanted a lot of things.

“Sucks to be you then, doesn’t it,” I told myself, and buried my head in my knees. “Shit happens. Sucks to be you.”

I don’t actually know how long I spent on watch. I don’t think it was a ridiculously long time, but I also wasn’t paying attention for most of it. It was lucky that we weren’t attacked. I’d probably have registered an enemy as a big rabbit and watched them gambol merrily past on their way to slaughter the innocent. Because, you know, my chakra sense was as crappy as the rest of my skills, and couldn’t actually detect chakra.

I didn’t know how to go back. That’s the problem with dramatic exits; either you stay in permanent exile or you slink back with shame-faced apologies, there’s no inbetween. It’s about as far from a power move as it’s possible to get. And the thing was, I did actually need to learn how to water walk. And, if I had to admit it to myself, I needed to learn how not to be incapacitated every time I went under water. Or got caught in a genjutsu - if Kakashi could stick me in a hell viewing technique when he was about the furthest thing from a genjutsu expert, then I’d be screwed if I ever went up against someone _good_ at illusions.

I just… didn’t want to go through the learning. It was going to be hard. I was going to hate it. In my animal hind brain I knew that water was bad and the safest thing to do was to stay away from it, and getting my instinctive fear-response to chill the fuck out while I went against that sound logic was something way beyond my ability to actually do.

Yeah. Sure. Fine. I was afraid. If you thought I’d managed to hide that from anyone, congratulations, you were wrong. Now that the anger had burnt out, I was left with a whole bundle of fears, ranging from the fact that I’d messed up the team to the fact that I’d messed up canon to the fact that my biggest weakness was now out there for people to act on and use against me. Not that I thought they would, given that my team were the only ones who knew. Team and Haku, maybe. At least, I didn’t _rationally_ think they would, but I also didn't think rationally, so.

But, after however long it was that I was on watch, the main thing I was left with was a bone-deep exhaustion. I hadn’t changed out of my wet clothes and I’d been too upset to get the immolation jutsu to work, so I was damp, cold, and completely drained. My socks were going to give me blisters if I didn’t change them for fresh ones. Ironic, given that the fact that I broke tradition and wore socks in the first place was because the sandals were weird and uncomfortable without them.

“Hell, I’m a mess,” I mumbled, tipping my head back against the tree. “Where’s Plushie-tan when you need him. I told him I’d go nuts if he wasn’t there to talk to.”

“Sasuke-kun?”

Sakura. I stared up at the leaves for a second, wondering if she’d go away if I didn’t answer. In the end though she’d either find me anyway or send one of the boys, and if I was honest she was probably the least objectionable person to talk to at the moment.

One of the boys. You _are_ a boy. Focus, dipshit.

“Up here,” I said. I waited for her to walk up to the branch below, then asked, “Your turn to be on watch?”

She shook her head, movements slow and eyes carefully not looking away from me. Like I was a skittish cat who’d bolt if she raised her voice.

Stop it, I chided myself. I _had_ bolted. She could look at me however she wanted.

“Kakashi-sensei’s taking patrol for the night,” she said. “He’s checking the perimeter, us three get a night off.”

I hnned in acknowledgement. Then, before the awkwardness could get any worse, “I’m sorry.”

“What? Sasuke-kun, no -”

“I shouldn’t have left like that,” I said, talking over her. “Kakashi was right to bring it up. My failures put the team at risk, I shouldn’t have got mad when he pointed it out.”

She bit her lip, eyes big in the semi-darkness. It had been cloudy all day and with the trees overhead I hadn’t been able to see the sky, but I realised that it had actually started to get dark without me realising. Huh.

“You know that isn’t what he meant, right?” she said. I looked back at her blankly. “Sasuke-kun… he wasn’t trying to blame you for anything. None of us blame you.”

“I never said you did.”

“Then you know we want to help you, right? If you want us to,” she hurried to add, and I wondered what had shown on my face. I didn’t know if I wanted to be helped. I’d rather not be in a position of needing help to begin with. “Because you’re you, not because you’re part of the team. Well, I mean, you _are_ part of the team, but we want you to be happier for your sake, not just to make the team stronger. Because you’re you.”

There was too much to unpack and I was too tired, so I just left it and changed the subject. “Thanks, Sakura. Maybe you should try for Hokage instead of Naruto, you’ve got this leadership business down.”

She made a frustrated huff and frowned at me. “I’m not being a leader,” she said. “I’m being a friend. Tsunami-san made dinner, if you want some.”

I was left staring at the empty space she left as she hopped down to the ground, completely blindsided. I didn’t… know what to do? It took me off guard enough that social anxiety fought with my exhaustion and won. How did people respond to unsolicited offers of friendship? If that even counted as an offer. Was I meant to reciprocate and say I was a friend too? I didn’t think I was a friend. How would I know? Hell, it was Ayame's mochi box all over again. Maybe I could do the same thing, hide it in the back of the cupboard and pretend it’d never happened. It worked for the mochi box.

My stomach grumbled at the mention of food though, so whatever I did would wait until after dinner. I dropped out of the tree and didn’t even have to jog to catch up with her, she’d been walking that slowly. I watched her warily, waiting for whatever bombshell she wanted to drop on me next, but she just smiled and increased her pace to a normal speed.

O...kay then?

“Sasuke-bastard!” Naruto practically yelped in greeting when we turned up. “You’re back! Did you -” I wasn’t looking at Sakura, so I don’t know what she did, but Naruto’s eyes flicked to her then back to me and he abruptly changed course. “Uh, want, some, um soup? It’s miso soup. You like miso soup. It’s tasty. Not as tasty as ramen but it’s still tasty.”

“Stop,” I said, vaguely bewildered at the rapid fire statements. “How did you ever pull a prank on anyone, you’re the least subtle person I’ve ever met.”

He sniffed, and here I couldn’t actually tell if he was being over dramatic or if this was his genuine reaction. “I have hidden depths,” he informed me. “Eat your soup.”

For want of anything better to do, I sat down, said thank you to Tsunami for dinner, and ate my soup. Sakura claimed the chair next to me and Naruto was opposite. Kakashi, I noticed, was nowhere to be seen. Sakura must’ve been serious about him being on patrol tonight then.

There was an oddly fragile atmosphere to the evening. Tazuna filled it with his normal chatter, and Tsunami and Sakura both nodded along and made correct listening-but-not-really-participating noises to keep things from feeling awkward. Inari appeared briefly to give us all our daily dose of nihilism and Naruto managed to suppress his usual loud response in favour of asking Tazuna something about cement. He was still trying to learn how construction worked; as useful as his clones _could_ be for a large scale building project, they weren’t actually helpful unless he knew what he was doing. Seeing as Tazuna’s team was a well oiled machine - even if most of them were on the older end of the spectrum, Gato having… discouraged the younger population - he was more often underfoot than not, and had been banned from the bridge until he could prove himself worthy of builder status. Luckily, Tazuna was more than happy to pass on his knowledge; unluckily, his teaching style was as erratic and ambitious as his blueprints. It was a work in progress.

I didn’t participate in any of the conversation, which wasn’t actually unusual. The way Sakura and Naruto were watching-not-watching me though, that was new. I’d look up from my plate and suddenly a bowl of rice and pickled vegetables had appeared in front of me. Look over at Naruto, and he was focused on Tazuna’s description of how harbour chains worked with a studied intensity that bordered on frightening, look back at Sakura and she just so happened to glance over at me with a distracted smile at that exact moment, then resume trying to convince Tsunami to let her help clear up. 

The whole thing was odd. Also my fault, so I didn’t say anything and just went along with it, but still odd. Not that I’d known what to expect. Not that I’d actually been expecting anything at all, really. I’d just blown up and stormed out without thinking, because why not.

The deliberately light hearted tone continued when we left the table and went up to our room. Tazuna’s house wasn’t big enough for us to have separate rooms but it was no big deal to share; there was a private area to get changed, and it was actually more comforting to sleep together as a team than have Sakura as the one girl in a separate room.

Was it socially acceptable, I wondered, to ask people why they were being so nice? Probably not. It probably counted as fishing for compliments, or some other thing I wasn’t meant to do. It felt rude though not to acknowledge what they were doing, even if I didn’t understand it, but just coming out with “Thank you for not being dicks about my childhood trauma” seemed a bit passive aggressive, so. Should I ask about the water walking training they did, or…?

I settled for an awkward wave on the way to the shower. I wasn’t even hiding, I was just genuinely getting clean - and putting on my pyjamas, if we had a night without needing to be up for patrol then I was making the most of it and more fool the other two if they hadn’t brought theirs - and I scrubbed as quickly as I could so as not to block the bathroom for the rest of the house. I even quick-dried my hair, towelling it roughly instead of leaving it to air dry or carefully patting out the moisture like I usually did. It left everything ridiculously fluffy and staticky, but it took less time, so. Fluffy hair was fine.

Sakura was carefully combing hers out when I got back to the room, apparently halfway through explaining to Naruto why she wasn’t going to copy his sexy no jutsu form and put it up in bunches.

“Why not?” he asked, throwing his hands up. “You said you wanted it out of your face, and they’re really cute!”

“For little girls! And how exactly are bunches out of my face, they’re _more_ in the way than having it loose.”

“Sakura-chan, that doesn’t make any sense.”

“Why don’t you braid it?” I suggested. Had I seen many braids on ninja? Had I seen many braids on anyone? For such a useful hair style, they seemed surprisingly overlooked.

The conversation - argument? - ground to a halt as soon as I spoke. I tensed up as they both looked at me. Stupid. I forgot, and now everything was back to being super careful and non-threatening again. “Sorry,” I said, looking away and making a beeline for my futon. 

“Braids are a great idea, Sasuke-kun!” Sakura said with far too much enthusiasm. “I’d love to braid it. I just don’t know how, so I was thinking of something else.”

And, because I hadn’t finished making everything supremely awkward for everyone involved, I said, “I could show you?”

Why. Do I do the things I do.

“Um, ok,” she said, looking about as wrong footed as I felt. “Thank you, Sasuke-kun.” Naruto was squinting between us with his prime _confused but waiting to see how it plays out_ expression on, and both of us elected to ignore him. 

“Ok. Right, then.” I knelt down behind her, and hoped I wasn’t blushing. She was definitely blushing. Kami please tell me this wasn’t secretly a romantic fantasy or something, I didn’t need it to be weirder than it already was. “Do you have a tie?”

She handed me a small elastic from her weapons pouch, proving once again that only a fraction of hair ties are ever actually used for tying hair up. I gathered her hair behind her head and tried not to let my fingers actually touch her, split it into sections, and started braiding. Functional, professional, just one teammate showing another a new skill, that’s all it was.

Half way through I found myself relaxing, the repetitive movements bringing up memories of doing this with friends from my old world. Her hair was surprisingly soft for a ninja, and too short at the front to pull back into a simple braid. I left some strands of her fringe loose instead and gathered the rest in a couple of smaller braids to merge into the larger one later, passing them forward for her to hold until I could bring everything together and finish off with the tie.

“Done,” I said, rocking back on my heels and surveying it with a critical eye. It was pretty. I’d’ve killed for hair like Sakura’s before; mine had been too curly for fancy styles and too dry to risk bleaching, pink and straight was a dream I could never have hoped to achieve.

She raised a curious hand to it, running her fingers over the braids. Naruto handed her a mirror (orange, and therefore probably a clone) before she could ask, and I retreated back to my futon as she examined herself. “Thank you, Sasuke-kun,” she said, this time much softer and less unsure than before. “It looks great. I love it.”

I waved her off, not willing to let my current calm turn unsettled again. “You’re welcome. It’s no trouble.”

“Hey bastard, do me! Do me next!”

I will fight you for my zen, Naruto. “Your hair’s even shorter than mine. There isn’t enough to braid.”

He put his hands together in a familiar seal. “Sexy no jutsu! Now do me, I have loads of hair!”

“Naruto, you can’t use that jutsu!” Sakura hissed. I think it’s only the fact that we were in someone else’s house that stopped her slamming him through the floor.

He wrinkled his nose. On his currently female face, it looked unbearably cute. Sakura was right though - the pigtails he’d chosen were very little girl, which was slightly odd on Naruto’s curvy, several years older body. Was it concerning? Should I be concerned? Didn’t he teach this jutsu to Konohamaru at some point?

“Why?” he asked. “You’re a girl and the bastard doesn’t care. I’m still wearing my jimjams, so what’s the problem?”

“Jimjams,” I repeated. “ _Jimjams._ Naruto what the fuck.”

“He probably does care, he’s just too polite to say so! Right, Sasuke-kun? It’s weird when a guy suddenly turns into a hot girl!”

They both looked at me. I floundered. Naruto called pyjamas jimjams and Sakura thought his girl form was hot. Surely we were learning more about them than about me at that moment. “Um,” I said. “I don’t mind? Whatever makes you comfortable.”

“See!” Naruto crowed, pointing vigorously in triumph. Sakura made a strangled sound and crossed her own arms over her chest as though Naruto would psychically get the message that his pyjama top - sorry, his _jimjam_ top wasn’t providing sufficient support. “The bastard’s fine with it!”

“The bastard’s going to bed,” I said, and lay down decisively. “Night.”

“What - hey, wait! You didn’t do my hair!”

“I’ll do it tomorrow night if you still want me to. _Sleep._ ” Who knew when we’d get a full uninterrupted night again, Kakashi couldn’t take solo watch all the time. I was going to make the most of it, damn it, even if I had to spend the entire time with my pillow over my head to achieve it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hatake Suppress-my-trauma-till-it-nearly-kills-me Kakashi  
> Hatake Only-alive-because-Gai-was-too-stubborn-to-give-up Kakashi  
> Hatake Lost-my-entire-team-and-refused-to-take-another-till-now Kakashi  
> Hatake Almost-got-my-genin-killed-on-his-first-mission Kakashi  
> Hatake Kakashi


	11. Chapter 11

Kakashi was still on watch the next morning. At least, we assumed he was; he didn’t turn up for breakfast, and he hadn’t left any instructions. It wasn’t impossible that he’d been horrifically wounded in the middle of the night and was now bleeding out with no backup, but surely he’d’ve left a note.

“I guess we… train?” Sakura suggested. “If we stay near the bridge we can keep an eye on Tazuna, and Naruto can leave a clone for the house.”

“Works for me,” Naruto said, poofing a clone into existence without bothering to take his arms out from behind his head. The clone gave a jaunty salute and bounced off to the roof, calling a trio of extra clones as it went for greater patrol coverage.

… There was something mildly terrifying about the way Naruto casually spammed clones, when you thought about it. Worse was the fact that neither he nor Sakura realised how exceptional he was. They were getting a very skewed idea of normal chakra limits.

“Hn,” I said for want of anything better to add, and followed the other two down towards the bridge. Sakura kept fiddling with the end of the braid she’d kept in from last night and occasionally blushing, but other than that we seemed to have moved past the awkward atmosphere. It was probably my imagination that they were walking a bit closer than usual, and I scowled and told myself to get a grip.

I had a full day of no sugar lined up, and barely any fruit leather left. That was a safer problem to focus on.

Tazuna accosted us with blueprints as soon as we arrived. “Identify the keystone and suggest a suitable material!” he demanded, shoving the papers in Naruto’s face.

“Wha - you haven’t taught me anything about keystones!”

“Then how do you expect to be a builder, huh? Trick question! This is a suspension bridge, we’re not using keystones!”

“Ah, It’s ok, Tazuna-san,” Sakura said, pulling Naruto back before he could shout a response. “We’re not going to get in the way of your team, we’re just going to be doing some training by the water. We’ll stay close so we can guard you, but we promise not to interfere.”

“Not to interfere, huh?” He scratched at his cheek. “Well, why not? If you just learnt a bit faster you could be useful. Think of the things I could build with an army of ninjas on hand!”

I opened my mouth to protest that that’s not what ninjas were for, then I remembered d-ranks and shut it again. Who was I kidding, if Tazuna had the money then that was _exactly_ what ninjas were for. Or genin, at least. The high stakes life-or-death battles that people were accustomed to imagining only really happened to jounin, most ninja were used for infrastructure and cheap labour.

Well, jounin and genin who happened to be main characters, but those were minor details.

We went down to the river bank under the bridge, aiming for a patch that had larger rocks by a deeper bit of water and avoiding the worst of the mud. The other two faltered when we reached it, glancing back at me guiltily.

“You should practice,” I said, flicking my gaze away. “Water walking is important, you need to learn it.”

“Yeah, but what about you, bastard?”

I wrinkled my nose. “I need to learn it too. I just…” I didn’t want to finish that sentence so I shrugged and changed what I was going to say. “I want to try some more things with wire. I think I can move it with my chakra if I concentrate.”

“You could try water walking by the shore?” Sakura offered. “It’s not hard to start. Sensei just said to push our chakra out to make a surface to stand on, but also pull it to keep it stable.”

“That’s it?” I asked. It didn’t seem like much instruction, but a lot of ninja teaching involved working things out for yourself, so I supposed I shouldn’t be surprised.

She nodded. “Then he left to go on patrol. It’s easier if you do it further out because the water’s flatter, but if you stay near the edge then… it could be better?” She trailed off, clearly uncomfortable bringing up my inability to swim without flipping out and needing rescuing. I tried to hold back my instinctive grimace; it wasn’t her fault I was such a mess, and she was actually being tactful in how she talked about it.

“Maybe,” I said instead, and sat down on a rock to start messing with a length of ninja wire. Thankfully she and Naruto took the hint and left me to it.

And I had been at least partially truthful. I’d noticed when reaching out for things with my chakra that I could, sometimes, move them. Not with any precision and not consistently, but if I concentrated then I could tug something towards myself, or if I pressed too hard trying to sense something I could knock something over. Small things, fairly light and with not much resistance, but wire was hardly heavy. In theory I should be able to run my chakra along it and control where it went. I knew you could buy chakra conductive metal that did something similar, but given that my kawarimi sense was very much focussed on physical objects there was no reason I could think of why it wouldn’t work with normal wire.

An hour later, I had at least four reasons, not the least of which being that it was fiddly as fuck.

“Work, you bugger,” I growled at the length of wire in front of me, and reached out to it for the thousandth time. My chakra refused to run along it so I had to recreate the shape myself and make it match as much as possible. It was tedious, but doable, at least while the wire was still on the ground; the problem came when I tried to pick it up. After a lot of trial and error I’d got it to the stage where I _could_ make it move.

I had not got it to the stage where I could make it move where I wanted. Sometimes it jerked violently up towards my hand, sometimes it flopped over in a pathetic roll, often one part would go vaguely the right way and I’d lose my grip on the next part and the whole thing would fall on the ground again. 

This time though seemed promising. I’d got the whole wire covered, and was _oh so carefully_ lifting the end closest to me a fraction off the ground. “Stay,” I told it, inching my way along the wire and tugging on the next part. “Stay. Don’t do it, stay _where I put you -_ oh fuck you you ignorant slut.”

I glared balefully at the coiled pile of shame and failure and sat back on my heels. “Progress,” I muttered sourly to myself. “Definitely progress. Shitty progress, but. Ugh.”

Still, at least I was staying dry. Sakura was doing better than Naruto on that front but both of them were more than a little soggy. Sakura seemed fine when she was standing still but hadn’t mastered lifting her feet up, and her cautious crab-walk sliding over the surface was weirdly distracting to watch. Naruto, on the other hand, was trying a similar approach to tree walking and taking the whole river at a run. He actually got quite far jesus-lizarding his way upstream, but he also used so much chakra he was creating waves in his wake that sent Sakura flying every time he got near her. Which he had done. Twice. She was pissed and it was hilarious.

“Push and pull, huh?” I said, frowning at them. The wire was doing my head in. I needed a break. “Push and pull… like a vibration? Do you make a chakra platform, or are you meant to rely on the surface tension?”

I scooted forward to the edge of my rock and unfolded a leg from underneath me, hovering my foot just over the surface of the water. I already knew that water felt solid to chakra because I’d already tried and failed to kawarimi through it, so if I just ignored the fact that it was a liquid…

“Sasuke,” Kakashi said, and I startled and scrambled back from the water to land in a defensive crouch.

“I wasn’t swimming,” I blurted. “It’s not deep enough. I just wanted to try.”

“Ah,” he said, frowning down at me in confusion. He blinked and visibly put my reaction out of mind, then dropped into an untidy squat next to me. “I have a jutsu for you. Watch.”

And, before I could even register that statement enough to be surprised, he started running through hand seals. Confused but intrigued, I watched; he performed them slowly enough for me to follow, rat dragon boar snake dog - 

“Sensei, that’s a water jutsu. I’m going to be a genjutsu specialist.”

“Watch,” he repeated, and did them again, faster this time and finishing on the dog to mark it as a water technique. He brought the final seal up to his chin and breathed over the backs of his hands, creating what looked like a thin glass bubble that stretched to cover his face. When he lowered his hands they passed through it and it seemed to disappear, though from the faint shimmer as he tilted his head I guessed it was just invisible.

“You see?” he asked, and yes, the bubble was definitely still there because his voice sounded muffled and distorted. I nodded, and he used an inverse dog seal to dispel the technique.

“Ok. Copy.”

“Right, ok, apparently it’s don’t use sentences day,” I mumbled. He thwapped me on the head, moving fast enough that I didn’t have a chance to duck, and glared at me until I went through the seals. I hesitated over the last one and didn’t actually push the chakra through to complete it. “What does it do?”

“It’s a variant of a poison filtering technique. The chakra forms a solid barrier around your face which neither air nor liquids can pass through. It lasts indefinitely, but in practice you only have a couple of minutes of air before you pass out.”

I frowned, running the explanation through my head again. Why would Kakashi be so insistent I learn a technique to defend against poison? Was he worried I was going to try and gasify the poisons I was using on my shuriken and - air. It clicked. _Air._ “It’s the bubblehead charm,” I said, wide eyed. He’d given me a jutsu version of the Harry Potter bubblehead charm to breathe underwater.

Holy fuck, he’d actually tried to fix my drowning problem.

“Bubblehead?” he repeated. “Ah, I suppose it could be. I hadn’t thought of a name yet.”

Holy fuck, he’d _created a jutsu_ to try to fix my drowning problem.

I swallowed around my suddenly dry mouth and dropped my gaze to my hands, bewildered. What the hell. Why would he - what the hell? Ninja weren’t just protective of their techniques, they downright _hoarded_ them. Particularly ones they’d developed themselves, because those were the secret weapons you could pull out that no one would know how to counter. You didn’t just go and make a brand new jutsu because some idiot kid threw a tantrum at you then go and _give_ it to them.

I mean, who knew what the idiot kid would do with it. They might abandon you and run away from the village and join their brother’s terrorist organisation. Who knew.

“Sasuke?” he prompted, and I blinked as I looked up. My eyes were stinging painfully and I felt small and shaky. I didn’t like it and my first instinct was to scowl and shy away, but on the other hand, I was still so confused. He'd not rescued me when I was drowning. He'd not taught me water walking when I asked him to. He'd not - there were a lot of things he'd not done. But he'd created a jutsu for me. I didn’t understand.

“Right,” I said instead, and brought my hands up again. Whether it made sense or not, Kakashi had done it, and the jutsu was one I needed. A couple of minutes wasn’t a huge amount of air, but it was enough. I put everything else out of my mind and focussed on the hand seals, rat dragon boar snake and blow over the back of the last one - dog.

The chakra was cold as it passed out through my mouth, cold and wet in a way I wasn’t sure if I was imagining or not. The bubble was cold as well, rippling up my face like someone dragging an ice cube over my skin, over my lips up to my nose -

I felt a spike of panic as it blocked my nose for a second and the jutsu dispersed. Shit.

“Again,” Kakashi said, back to his one word sentences and watching me intently. I took a breath to centre myself and gathered my chakra again. Rat dragon boar snake _blow_ dog - ice cube up the face - _nose_ \- fuck.

“Again,” he said, but I was already running through the seals. This time I held my breath beforehand so I wouldn’t feel it being blocked, and the bubble got as far up as the bridge of my nose before I lost it.

“ _Again._ ”

I grit my teeth and tried again.

It took me the rest of the day to succeed at the bubblehead jutsu. Much as I hated to admit it, the water chakra _was_ easier to work with than the fire chakra I was used to - it had none of the loading time I associated with ninjutsu, which I now realised was me converting my chakra to fire before I could begin using it. But still, chakra was meant to be a warm glow, alternately fast and flickering or strong and smouldering. Water chakra was cold, running through me like a chill. It could be just as fast and responsive as fire was - maybe even more so given how easily it listened to me in comparison, but there was a solidity and weight behind it that, frankly, I didn’t like.

“Well, tough,” I said, frowning at myself in the bathroom mirror. “It might save your life. Suck up and deal.”

My reflection frowned back, as bony and short as ever. At least the kunai wound had healed enough for me to ditch the bandages that morning, so that was one thing I had going for me.

I shook my head in frustration. This was not sucking up and dealing. This was wallowing in self pity and it needed to stop. I was bony and short but I could tie myself in a pretzel and I still had more muscles than I’d ever had in my past life. I was fine, I hadn’t been kicked off the team for being a liability, I had no excuse for, for - _moping_ about things. I was _fine_ , damnit.

“Fucking mess,” I muttered, and stepped out the bathroom.

“Who were you talking to?” Inari asked, leaning against the wall with his arms crossed in his normal sullen pout.

“None of your business,” I said. “Why were you eavesdropping? Don’t you have somewhere else to go be sulky at?”

I wasn’t… good with kids. 

“I need to wash my hands,” he said. I rolled my eyes and made to go past him - I could already hear the others downstairs, dinner was about to start. He didn’t move though, stubbornly blocking the corridor and squinting up at me. “You don’t _look_ dead.”

What. “What.”

“I heard the other two talking about it yesterday. They said you died. You don’t look dead to me.” He glared at me as though my lack of a coffin had personally offended him.

“The hell,” I said. “Do you eavesdrop on everyone? It’s still none of your business. I’m clearly not dead. Move.”

“Dead people don’t come back!” he insisted, and still didn’t move.

 _Not with that attitude they don’t_ , I thought, but I bit my tongue and didn’t actually say it. I didn’t want to drag the conversation on either, as thrilling as it was, nor spill all my secrets to a whiny pre-human. “My family died,” I said shortly. “I didn’t. Nor am I going to. What I _am_ going to do is have dinner.” And, because I was a ninja and what was the point in having these skills if I wasn’t going to use them, I stuck my hand to the ceiling and swung myself neatly over him to get past.

“You don’t know that,” he said, jogging after me and failing to take the hint. I scowled at him, but he scowled right back and carried on. “You’re facing Gato. You’re going to die. You’re all going to die, so what’s the point?”

“Who the fuck said there had to be a point? I’m hungry. That’s why. Go wash your hands.”

“You’re _hungry?_ What kind of stupid reason is that?”

I stopped, just outside the kitchen. He wasn’t going away. Why wasn’t he going away. If he was waiting for an inspirational speech about heroism, he wasn’t going to get it from me, but if I didn’t make him stop then he’d snipe at me through dinner and Sakura would get mad at me for swearing.

So, I turned around and crouched down in the most annoying, patronising way I could. “I like mochi,” I said. “And ice cream. Dango. Strawberries. If I died, I wouldn’t be able to eat. So, I fight people who want to kill me, because if I just rolled over and gave up I’d never get sweets again. Ok? Good. Piss off.”

I gave him a gentle shove backwards to emphasise my point and stood up again.

“That’s _it?_ ” he called after me as I finally entered the kitchen. “That’s stupid!”

I waved a lazy hand and didn’t bother turning back. He’d already called it stupid. Get more creative with your insults, proto-person, they suck.

“What’s stupid?” Naruto asked as I sat down.

“Your face,” I answered, because my insults were barely any more creative than Inari’s, and hid my satisfied smirk in my tea when he squawked.

Kakashi was on patrol again that night, and though I was slightly worried about his mental health at this stage - he’d seemed more than a touch frazzled when he was teaching me, and was also still going round on crutches - I wasn’t going to turn down another chance for proper sleep. It came with the price of recreating Sakura’s braids on Naruto’s sexy no jutsu hair, which would have been a lot easier and more relaxing if he was able to sit still. I’m pretty sure that Sakura was able to follow along and mimic them in her own hair though, which was the important part.

We took the bridge watch in shifts the next day rather than relying on Naruto’s clones, because otherwise neither Sakura nor I would actually pull our weight on the mission. Not that there was much weight to be pulled right at the moment given how quiet everything seemed, but it was the principle of it. Tazuna wasn’t paying us to practice water walking and swear at ninja wire.

Although, was he paying us? If this had been the c-rank he’d originally bought we’d be home by now. I had no idea how the logistics of the mission upgrade worked. Huh.

Anyway. By the end of the day Sakura had water walking mostly down, and by the end of the next she was going through her katas on the surface almost fast enough to be useful in a fight. Naruto could run, jump and cartwheel pretty much endlessly, but if he stood still for too long he slowly sank until the technique failed and he fell in. I’d got the bubblehead charm to a state where I could summon it practically in my sleep and hold the bubble for a full ninety seconds before it became too hard to breathe and I dropped it.

And, because I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to expand that time with practice - the issue was that I was breathing in the same air I’d just breathed out, I was both piling up the carbon dioxide and running through the oxygen and that wasn’t something doing hand seals faster would solve - I’d also progressed, tentatively, to cautious steps and then even more cautious sprints on the surface of the water.

In the shallows. We’re talking puddle depth here. I saw no purpose in dumping myself in the river if I didn’t have to; it was still water walking if there was solid ground two inches below the surface.

All this, on top of the usual stretches and workouts, limited sleep once Kakashi put us back on night watches, the occasional spar when one or all of us got sick of training, and being used as a runner to carry messages around the village for Tazuna. It was _exhausting_. It was like Kakashi thought we wouldn’t have the energy to be sad if he used it all up on making us do drills. Which was potentially valid and potentially working, but still. Exhausting.

And, one afternoon when the bridge was about two thirds done, it was over.

I was on watch, sat at the top of one of the suspension supports with a small orange book in my lap. The book’d started as an experiment - could Naruto henge into something he’d never seen? No, was the answer; he could copy the cover of Icha Icha but the pages were blank - but we realised that it was much less strain for Naruto to receive the memories of a henged clone than one that had been actively thinking before it dispelled. They were now our early warning system; dispel the clone, and even if Naruto only got a vague impression of what was happening he’d know enough to know where you were and that you needed his attention.

I noticed the mist first. It came off the river in waves, some patches thicker, some lighter - it looked natural. You got mists sometimes, even during the day if the air was cool enough. After that came the absence of noise, the hammering and banging and general clatter fading out as the sounds were absorbed by the mist.

I frowned, leaping down from my perch to land in a near silent crouch. From the bridge level, the mist looked too thick to be natural - and the sudden chill compared to the warmth of the air above set my skin prickling with unease.

“Tazuna-san,” I said, walking towards where I knew him to be. The mist swirled around me, settling in a dense layer up to my knees and creeping over the edge of my vision. I couldn’t see my feet, and the other bridge builders were little more than shadowy outlines. “Tazuna - Kakashi?”

The figure in front of me turned, hands in his pockets and eye curved up in a lazy smile. “Sasuke-kun,” he greeted. “Go and train with the other two, I’ll take the next watch.”

The voice was a perfect match. So was the appearance, even the way he slouched. My eyes flicked almost imperceptibly up to his hair; Kakashi’s, in this much dampness, would frizz so badly that some of the front sections would start to spiral out in tiny corkscrew curls. This man’s hair did not. Henge.

“Hn,” I said in careful non acknowledgment. “Where are they training?”

“Down by the river. More water walking.” It was more information than I hoped he’d have. Or she - henge could easily disguise gender. Did it mean someone was watching Naruto and Sakura? Were they in danger? Gato hadn’t hired any other ninja in the original, but this scenario didn’t match what I remembered of canon. The building crew were here, for one, even if they were being eerily quiet.

Not that canon was the beacon of truth I used to think it was, but I couldn't think of any changes I'd made that would affect Gato's choices.

“See you later, Sensei,” I said, turning with a casual wave. I kept myself loose and deliberately careless and bent my knees in preparation to leap away. Except, instead of leaping I sent an illusion clone springing off while I kawarimid with a nearby pebble - hopefully, the imposter Kakashi would mistake the sound of the pebble as just the sound of me leaving. I crouched behind what looked like a cement mixer, concentrating on keeping both my chakra and my heart rate suppressed while I tried to see what was happening.

I only had one Naruto clone. If I dispelled it now, all he’d know was that there was a strange mist and Kakashi had sent me home - I didn’t know if he’d pick up on the danger. I didn’t know how _much_ danger there was to pick up on.

Then: Zabuza. He seemed almost to coalesce out of the mist, as though he were some kind of spirit made out of air and water. My breath caught in my throat - I didn’t need Sakura and Naruto, I needed _Kakashi._ The real Kakashi. Where was he? He was meant to be nearby. How had Zabuza got past?

“You’re too soft,” he scolded the Kakashi imposter. Haku, it had to be Haku. Shit. They weren’t meant to be here yet. _Shit._ “Remember the mission.”

Haku dipped his head in a respectful bow. “Yes, Zabuza-sama,” he said. “The workers are unconscious. When they wake, they will find their tools missing and the bridge builder dead.”

My mind raced. Gato wanted the bridge stopped, but he also wanted Wave broken so it wouldn’t disobey again. So why wasn’t he killing the workers? Martyrs, my mind suggested. Gato’s crew was old because they knew it was dangerous, they’d volunteered to keep the younger members of the town safe. If they died, Gato was turning them into heroes - whatever Inari thought of it - and the town would rebel against him in their memory. Tazuna was the kind of batshit brave that could never be cowed, he _had_ to die, and for the rest… Psychological warfare? The realisation that Gato could have had them killed at any point would be a heavy one. If they were scared off, there’d be nothing left for Wave to rally behind.

I needed to get Tazuna out of here.

I also needed backup.

I stabbed a shuriken into the clone book, keeping it pressed against my stomach to try and hide the smoke and the flare of chakra. I still wanted Naruto to get more information, but I couldn’t delay any longer - I could only hope he’d heard Haku and Zabuza. As soon as the clone was gone I moved, sliding soundlessly out from behind the cement mixer and back to one of the suspension supports. The mist was too thick at bridge level; I needed height. Even from just a few metres above I could see clearer, and I wrapped a henge around myself to blend in as much as possible with the concrete and metal behind me.

Where was Tazuna? I didn’t have time to be cautious. I couldn’t hear anything, I couldn’t _see_ anything, but the mist wasn’t solid - my chakra cut through it easily, thin tendrils searching for anything old man shaped. I felt a worker, slumped over on the floor, a pile of twisted steel cords, the other end of the bridge - _there._ Just before the end of the bridge, one figure backing away and two advancing. Thank fuck Zabuza was dramatic and liked to intimidate his victims, if he’d gone straight for the kill I’d be too late.

With Tazuna firmly fixed in my head I dropped off the bridge and hit the water running. My heart raced, but I didn’t let myself - _couldn’t_ let myself think about what was under my feet. The bank was getting closer, but Tazuna was running out of time; I pushed myself faster, four seconds, three, two -

I switched with him the second my foot hit the shore, flinging Tazuna to safety and sending myself straight into the path of Zabuza’s oversized sword. I yelped, twisting to the side just in time to avoid being decapitated and scrambled into another kawarimi with a random piece of building debris. I hadn’t gone far - I couldn’t, I’d reached for the first thing I found and swapped in a panic - but with the mist and my henge still active, I thought I might’ve got away with it.

Where the fuck was my backup. Kakashi, please, I’ll take back everything I said about you being a dick, just don’t leave me to die again.

“Ah,” Zabuza said from somewhere behind me. “I thought I felt someone poking around. Come out, little leaf. The mists are no place for you to hide.”

I grit my teeth and tried desperately to think of a way out. Haku had his ice prison, unless that was _another_ way I was going to get screwed over by reality not following canon, but Haku didn’t want to kill anyone. If I ended up fighting him then all I had to do was stall enough for Naruto to get here and use the kyuubi to break his mask and realise who -

Oh. Oh no.

Reality hadn’t followed canon. Naruto had never fallen asleep in the forest after a tree climbing training session. He’d never met Haku. Fuck, he’d never been given his core nindo, but more importantly, he had no reason to spare Haku’s life, which was _minorly inconvenient_ given that I wanted him to live.

If I fought Haku I’d lose and either Tazuna would die or Haku would die - or hell, why not both - and if I fought Zabuza I’d lose and _I_ would die. And then probably Tazuna and Haku. These were shit odds.

I heard the kunai a second before I saw it and threw myself aside. It skimmed over my shoulder; if my reflexes had been any slower, that would’ve been my throat.

“Didn’t I say, Konoha? The mists are no place to hide. I know where you are wherever you are and there’s nothing you can do to stop me.”

His voice echoed from all around me, and though I lashed out with my chakra trying to lock him down he was too slippery for me to know where he came from. I felt something move towards me but couldn’t tell where it was aimed so I gambled and leapt straight up, spinning in the air and sending a fistful of shuriken back the way I’d come. They missed, but Zabuza had tracked my jump and was waiting for me when I landed, and I twisted to try and change direction but I couldn’t move far enough -

“Sasuke!” Tazuna shouted, and hooked an arm around my waist to tackle me out the way. He landed in a controlled roll and shoved me back towards the main part of the bridge. “Get out, stay away from this fight - get the workers back to the village.”

“What - no, you’re the mission, I have to -” I faltered to a halt as Tazuna raised a hand and dispelled his henge, and Kakashi glared back at me with both eyes uncovered.

Oh thank fuck I was going to live. I would never say a bad word against this man ever again. He was my precious sunshine child and I loved him.

“Now, Sasuke,” he commanded, shoving me back with - I’m not actually sure, a wind jutsu? I didn’t see any hand signs - before unsheathing a short sword from his back and diving forward again.

A short sword. Against Zabuza’s overcompensation? Relief at seeing him was warring with the fact that I was still very much in danger and the combination left me almost off kilter enough to giggle. Battle of the swords. Would it be the size that counted, or would it be the way they used them. _Swords._

Then the water dragons started rising and I remembered that yes, I _was_ still very much in danger, and started running. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Zabuza: Go deal with the genin, would you?  
> Haku: *politely asks Sasuke to leave so he won't get caught in the battle*  
> Zabuza: listen,,,


	12. Chapter 12

The mists thinned the further back I got. I saw Naruto and Sakura before they saw me, though it only took another second for them to notice me.

“Bastard!” Naruto shouted, completely undermining my attempts to be sneaky and escape without Haku or Zabuza noticing. “What the hell, what’s happening?”

“Zabuza,” I said shortly. “Kakashi’s fighting him, we have to get the civilians out. Where’s Tazuna? I left him on the shore.”

“We didn’t see anyone,” Sakura said, falling in step with me and sending an uneasy glance back at the dense mist. I frowned; had that already been Kakashi that I’d switched with? He must’ve noticed Zabuza and laid a trap for him without telling me.

I take back everything I said. Kakashi’s a dick. Who does that? Assholes, that’s who.

“Concentrate on the others then, maybe he’s already safe,” I said. Sakura nodded and gestured at Naruto.

“Already on it, believe it!” he answered with his hands in a cross seal, and the bridge filled with orange as he rushed to collect the still unconscious workers. A second later and his clones dispersed in a rain of senbon, leaving Naruto reeling back with a startled yelp.

“I’m sorry,” Haku said politely, shunshining to a stop in front of us. “I can’t let you do that.” He’d dropped his earlier Kakashi-henge and was back in the Kiri uniform, complete with red and white patterned mask.

“The hunter nin,” Sakura hissed through clenched teeth, dropping into a ready position. She glanced between us and the sprawled forms of Tazuna’s bridge crew, eyes darting frantically as she thought of a plan.

“He was going to leave them alive,” I said under my breath, shifting my weight on my toes and slipping a handful of shuriken into my palm. They weren’t poisoned, but the wire looped through each one was - there wouldn’t be enough on the wire to be deadly, just to slow Haku down.

If I could hit him. I was fast, but his kekkei genkai was all about speed. I was pretty sure he was faster.

“Why?” Naruto asked from my other side. I opened my mouth to answer but Sakura beat me to it, already having worked it out.

“Scare tactics,” she said. “If they’ve not managed to kill Tazuna though that could easily change. We can’t risk it.”

I cursed, but she was right - it was the sensible way to approach the fight. And as much as I wanted to believe Haku wouldn’t, I couldn’t bet other people’s lives on the fact that he’d behave the way I expected him to.

“So what, we just stand here and wait to see if he kills them?” Naruto asked, unimpressed. “Hey, hunter-bastard! Are you going to attack us or what?”

I barely resisted a groan. “Naruto you utter fuckhead. Why.”

“My job is to keep you here,” Haku said, still weirdly polite. He even tilted his head forward in regretful acknowledgement as he continued, “I apologise for not letting you go, but your sensei has already demonstrated that he will act irrationally where you are concerned. His attachment to his tools is odd, but useful.”

In other words, we were distractions. _Great._

“We’re not _tools_ ,” Naruto spat, and I startled at the intensity of his reaction. “We’re people! And if you can’t see that, then you’re wrong - and I’m going to beat you to prove it, believe it!”

“Naruto!” Sakura reached for him but he’d already charged, clones popping into existence around him, many of them already henged into a variety of weapons. She swore, but readied a kunai for her own charge. “Sasuke, get the civilians out, we’ll -”

“Wait,” I said, grabbing her shoulder. “Sakura, _wait._ Zabuza’s an S class missing nin. He’s not going to keep someone around if they’re weak. You can’t go rushing in.” If she did, then it’d just be two of them trapped in his ice mirrors, and _then_ what the fuck was I meant to do.

“You understand,” Haku said, tilting his masked head in my direction. “What is not useful is not worth keeping, this is the way of shinobi. But it won’t help you.” Another wave of senbon, and another round of Naruto clones popping - though I noticed that about a third used the henged weapons they were carrying to block the needles, losing the weapons but easily surviving to make more. Naruto reached him in a flurry of snarling taijutsu that certainly looked impressive, even though it didn’t appear to be having any effect.

“You’re the fastest,” Sakura said. “The civilians are the priority. Switch them out, and hurry.”

I grimaced in frustration, but it made sense - Sakura and Naruto together should at least be able to keep Haku distracted, and the workers were in too much risk from the crossfire to leave them. I nodded, she gave me a tense grin and a fist bump that I had to scramble to return in time, and we darted off in opposite directions.

“Naruto, civilians,” I reminded the closest clone, beelining towards the nearest worker. Kawarimi would be the quickest way to get off the bridge, but I’d never tried carrying a person with me and I didn’t know if I could. Get to land then switch back again, like I’d done with Kakashi-as-Tazuna? That was still only one at a time.

He shook me off, turning on me with a glare. “We’re not tools,” he repeated. “Tools can be discarded and ignored and he needs to see that he can’t dismiss us like that!”

“We don’t have time for this,” I said harshly, hooking my fingers in his jacket trying to drag him over. He shook me off again, jaw set mulishly, and I stifled a frustrated scream. “Fuck’s sake, Naruto! What happened to being Hokage? You’re meant to protect everyone!”

“The Hokage is important!” he snapped back. “If I’m going to be Hokage and I’m going to make them see me, I have to start here - I have to prove I matter!”

I felt a distant, teetering kind of dread. Naruto’s nindo - his precious people - that had been Haku’s nindo. If he didn’t get that, if he never made those promises, how much of the story would fall apart?

There wasn't time to deal with it. “I thought the team mattered,” I accused, a deliberately bitter comment designed to hurt because _I_ was hurt and I never claimed to be a good person. I turned my back on him and angled towards the unconscious workers, rapidly calculating the distance to the shore and how many I could take on each trip.

I got as far as half-lifting the first into my arms before a precise wave of senbon forced me to leap back.

“I’m sorry,” Haku said, appearing in front of me. “Like I said, I can’t let you leave.”

“How the fuck -” I glanced over at where Naruto - the original, not the clone I’d been talking to - and Sakura were still fighting. Sakura was springing back, angling herself straight up and readying a drop kick to land on Haku as she came back down; Naruto was somewhere in a sea of orange, surrounded by a continuous cloud of smoke as he replaced the bunshin Haku kept cutting down.

“Clone,” I accused the Haku in front of me. “Why is it always _clones_.”

“The most basic of techniques can sometimes be the most effective,” Haku said. “Kunai still claim more bounties than jutsu do.”

“I’m a shuriken kind of girl,” I shot back, already letting a handful fly. He dodged them, sending senbon back, and I dodged in return, yanking on the wires attached to the shuriken to pull them sweeping round. It was enough to make Haku abandon his next attack and I came in sudden and low under the opening he left, hands up in lightning fast taijutsu combination that he barely blocked. I was right; he _was_ fast, but so was I, and all I needed was for him to make one mistake -

I dived for an opening he left and he spun out of the feint, slicing at my hip with a fucking _sword_ what the hell, had someone forgotten to give me the memo that today was big pointy metal day? His was probably a katana or something like that, I wasn’t an expert and I didn’t have time to study it. I leapt back, already cataloguing the sting I felt and dismissing it as not bad enough to worry, and dipped my hand into my weapons pouch for more -

“You can’t be serious,” I hissed, as my fingers came up empty. It - and all my shuriken in it - was on the ground, next to Haku’s feet. _Shit._

“A good shinobi makes use of his tools,” Haku said, not even out of breath. “But he doesn’t rely on them. They are only tools, after all.”

“Would you _quit_ with the preachy metaphors? I don’t care if you think ninjas are _bananas_ , if they’re my bananas I’m still going to fight you for them because otherwise what’s the fucking point?”

He frowned. “Ah,” he said unsurely, “I’m not sure you -”

“Bastard, switch!” the Naruto-clone I'd been talking to earlier yelled, flinging an unreasonably large shuriken at Haku from behind. My heart jumped and I flashed him a savagely relieved grin; a second and a senbon later and both clone and henged-clone shuriken were dispelled, but a second was all I needed to grab one of the clones next to Sakura and kawarimi into a defensive roll while I assessed the situation around them. They’d been leading the original Haku back away from the workers and we were now solidly in the mist that surrounded Kakashi and Zabuza’s fight; this was probably good in terms of civilian life expectancy, though not so good for us.

Worse for us was the way the mist started crystallising into ice.

“The hell is that?” Naruto - the original Naruto - asked, standing back to back with me and Sakura and practically bristling with senbon.

“Ice release,” Haku said, appearing in front of us with one hand raised in a seal. I looked back frantically towards the workers before our view was obscured, but he seemed to have dispersed that clone of his. Lucky. And stupid of me to leave them unprotected; a more practical enemy would have used the clone to kill them. “Demonic mirroring ice crystals.”

Seriously, everyone from Mist was demon _obsessed._

The ice rose in sudden sheets, arching over to block us in. “Sakura,” I said, and she cut across me with a gesture to Naruto.

“I need protection, I can’t hit that straight on.”

Two clones obligingly henged into orange knuckle guards. “They’ll dispel,” he warned. “You only get one hit.”

“All I need,” she promised. The ice was almost solid overhead, just the last gaps steadlily sealing closed. “Shannaro!”

She charged, and the ice shuddered, cracked - and held. The damage healed over and Sakura backed away from the mirror, shaking out her wrist and glancing back at us uneasily.

“It won’t work,” Haku said, his face fading into view in one of the mirrors. “This technique is cursed. I don’t like to use it, but in defence of my precious person, I will. There’s no way out.”

“I don’t believe in no way out,” Naruto snarled, his temper rising again. “And I don’t believe in curses! People who just accept the way things are are wrong, and I’m going to show them!”

“Can you try again?” I muttered to Sakura. She shook her head. “Shit.” My punching strength was abysmal, and I had no weapons. The mirrors were solid, I couldn’t kawarimi through them, and Haku wouldn’t stay distracted by Naruto’s increasingly irate tirade about people having their fate decided for them for long. “Will fire help?”

“Do it,” she said, taking a couple of steps to the side to shield me from view. “But _fast_.”

 _Fast_ and _Sasuke performing the grand fireball technique_ didn’t go together. I flew through the hand seals, forcing my chakra to heat up and bend itself out of water and into fire.

“Faster!”

“You want me to vaporise myself?” I sniped back, but sacrificed the last bit of chakra shaping in favour of just belting out the malformed mess in an uncontrolled burst. It burnt my throat and seared my fingers, and only the arm protectors I wore kept my hands and wrists safe. I was vaguely aware of a swarm of senbon flying my way and being intercepted by an equal swarm of yelling, quickly dispersed Narutos.

“Hit it,” I croaked when the flame ran out. “Hit it, damnit!” Sakura wrapped something round her knuckles - a cloth, another clone, I couldn’t see clearly - and rammed her fist into the mirror I’d flambeed. It cracked, groaned - and shattered.

“Naruto!” she yelled as the hole started closing up almost immediately. “Let’s go!”

He whirled on us, eyes flashing red and his entire jacket turned into a porcupine of senbon. “No! I need to prove -”

I growled in frustration, dodging under Haku by millimeters and diving through the exit. “You’re already important, you idiot! Now be important out here!”

He faltered, eyes wide (and blue, did I imagine the red?) and locked on me. “I’m… No, I’m… not?”

Sakura slammed her fist into the mirror again, trying to keep the hole open, but she was fighting a losing battle against it. I couldn’t see where Haku was - could he use the reflections while one of his mirrors was broken? - but if Naruto didn’t move _right now_ he’d be stuck inside again, and I really _really_ couldn’t do another fireball.

“You’re important to us,” I said with more patience than I felt, but still a very small amount of patience on a cosmic scale. “So will you, _pretty please,_ get your ass out here so we can fight together like a fucking team is meant to do.”

He cracked a smile. “Because we’re bananas, right?”

Whatever you want. What the hell. Just _get._

“I don’t understand the bananas,” Haku said plaintively, appearing in the middle of me and Sakura and sending us both sprawling back. I flipped over to land on my feet but ended up perilously close to the edge and with Haku bearing down on me, there was nowhere to go but over it. I didn’t trust myself to water walk so I ran through the seals Kakashi had drilled me in until I could do them in my sleep, rat dragon boar snake _blow_ dog -

I felt cold around my mouth as the bubble tried to form, but it spluttered and died. There was too much fire in my chakra from the fireball. I hadn’t changed it back. The bubblehead jutsu needed water and I had no time to give it water.

Over Haku’s shoulder I could see Naruto, fighting to get through the rapidly closing hole in the ice but too late to make it. I don’t know what he saw in my face but his eyes went wide in shock, then Haku reached me, Sakura screamed my name, and I wasn’t fast enough to dodge.

The handle of his sword hit my temple, and if it hadn’t been for his other hand fisting in my shirt and throwing me back on the bridge I’d’ve dropped straight in the river. As it was I landed badly, dazed and nauseous and barely able to tell which way was up. I struggled onto my elbows then froze, the cold of his sword a heavy weight against my back.

“Stop,” he said, not looking at me. “One teammate is trapped, the other will be killed if you move. You have lost.”

“No,” Sakura said in a shaky voice. “Kakashi-sensei -”

“Will not defeat Zabuza-sama again,” Haku finished for her. He almost sounded gentle. I focussed on regretting ever thinking I should save him to distract myself from the growing need to throw up. “You must-”

And then, with an eruption of flames and desperation that formed a towering, firey inferno of demonic chakra, the ice dome exploded.

“This technique is cursed,” Naruto spat from the centre of the wreckage, red pouring off him in visible waves. “I don’t like to use it but in defence of my precious people I will! They’re my team and I’m going to fight you for them because otherwise what’s the fucking point?”

Oh my god.

“Run, Haku,” I said as politely as I could, and let my shaking arms give way to deposit myself on the floor. Oh my _god._ I was still reeling from the blow to my head, but I think I heard correctly. Had he seriously spliced together two different pieces of trash talk and turned them into his nindo? Had I accidentally given Naruto his core purpose by telling Haku I’d fight him for a banana? He must've got the memory when his clone dispelled. What the hell. _What._

I let the wave of kyuubi-infused protective fury wash over my head as Naruto yelled a battle cry and charged, and hoped Sakura wasn’t too freaked out. I just… I needed a moment.

A freaking _banana._

Much as I wanted to stay on the concrete floor of the bridge and wait for the world to either end or stop spinning, I couldn’t. Kakashi was still fighting Zabuza, Haku was still fighting Naruto - though Naruto was doing an excellent job of beating him back into the mist - and, as annoyed as I was at Haku for being a bitch to fight and absolutely trouncing me, he had still saved my life and I did still owe him one.

“C’mon,” I said, staggering over to Sakura and tugging insistently on her shoulder until she stood up. “Up. Up, Sakura, I need someone to lean on.”

She let out a shaky breath and got unsteadily to her feet. I followed through on my statement and shamelessly used her as a crutch, because the bridge felt a few degrees off vertical and I didn’t want to slide off it and end up in the water.

“What was that?” she asked. I frowned, thinking laboriously through the answer, then remembered it wasn’t my secret to tell and waved her off.

“‘S Naruto. He has a lot of chakra. Can we catch up to them?”

“Naruto?” She shuddered. “But it felt so… _bad._ ”

Bad? It’d been impressive, all angry and flamey and hot in the way that fire chakra should be, but she was being over sensitive about it feeling bad. Unless she just didn’t like fire? It was possible. Rude. But possible.

“I think he was pissed,” I said. “Move, please. I need you to do the feet thing because I can’t walk.”

“I - yeah.” She shook herself and shifted her arm to wrap tighter around my waist. “Wait, you can’t walk?”

“‘M. Ears ringing. Dizzy. Think ‘m concussion. ‘M fine, go go go.”

“You’re _concussed?_ ” she repeated, but she also started walking, so. Win. “I don’t know what to do for a concussion. Should you be lying down? Do you need medicine? I have bandages.”

“Focus,” I said, tugging on her braid. Huh, she was still copying the one I did for her. It looked pretty. She needed to twist it as she braided it though so the little short bits didn’t stick out so much. I’d tell her later.

We limped through the mist, searching for our team. I tried stretching out with my kawarimi sense and discovered that it reached just fine, but it also made me feel violently sick if I tried to move it anywhere but straight ahead. Still, we found Naruto and Haku easily enough - Haku was being pinned by Naruto, his mask in pieces, and from the sound of it he was trying to talk Naruto into killing him because he was a tool who’d failed his purpose.

“Stop that,” I chided, abandoning Sakura to stumble over to Naruto instead. “You’re upsetting him. He doesn’t want to kill you.”

“Bastard!” Naruto said, springing back from Haku with wide eyes. “I thought you were - I saw - you’re ok!”

“He has a concussion,” Sakura said, coming up behind with a kunai drawn. She seemed the only one still wary of Haku, and I wondered what he’d said to Naruto.

“A small one,” I defended. “It’s already going.” It was - chakra made shinobi much more resilient than civilians, and that extended to our brains as well. At least, it did for physical damage. It’d never approach Naruto’s healing factor, but it was a useful benefit when your livelihood consisted of throwing yourself at people who hit you.

“I’m glad,” Haku said, closing his eyes in a soft smile. “I didn’t want to cause you permanent harm. It’s my failing as a tool.”

“That’s not the way it works!” Naruto said, whirling on him in distress. Emotional backstory? I was betting they’d been talking about Haku’s emotional backstory. Naruto was a bleeding heart for lonely people.

“It is for me,” Haku corrected him gently. “Zabuza-sama is -” he froze, eyes wide, and I picked up the faintest sounds of chirping birds in the distance. “Zabuza-sama!”

He took off in a shunshin, faster than any of us could hope to stop him - not that either of the other two could know that they had to. I glared in his direction.

“Fuck you, asswipe,” I said, shooting a tendril of chakra after him - oh god, _nausea_ \- and kawariming with him because I might have a minor concussion but I did _not_ go through this whole traumatic experience for canon to decide that _now_ it wanted to play ball and kill someone I liked.

Appearing directly in front of a tired, bloody Zabuza currently being held in place by an entire pack of dogs with a feral Kakashi bearing down on me, pure electric death in his hands, was, um, exactly the result I should have foreseen and somehow completely unexpected.

“Shit.”

“Sasuke -!” I flinched and closed my eyes, too drained to be able to react, and through some sheer miracle of heroic feats Kakashi managed to redirect his chidori to grind down into the floor. I winced at the sound; Tazuna wouldn’t be pleased by the giant hole in his bridge.

“What the _hell_ were you thinking?” Kakashi snapped, sounding so much like my dad - my old-world dad - that I snapped my eyes open again and was almost thrown by the lack of beard. He looked _pissed,_ glaring at me with both eyes open and sharingan spinning furiously.

“Um,” I said, feeling about as small and pathetic as I’d done every time my old-world dad had used the same phrase on me. _You’re grounded for the next century young lady, do you have any idea how worried your mother was?_ I cleared my throat and tried again, wishing that the last bit of ringing would go from my ears. “Um, Haku saved my life. I didn’t want him to die.”

I sounded like a little kid.

Behind me, Zabuza laughed, low and grating, and Kakashi’s face hardened immediately. “Seems like we’re both cursed with soft students,” Zabuza drawled, and brought a heavy hand down on my shoulder. I tensed, but didn’t move - the hand had a kunai in it, resting lazily but with clear intent on the edge of my collar bone.

I was getting really sick of playing hostage.

“Zabuza-sama!” Haku said, appearing next to us with Sakura and Naruto in quick succession behind him. He hesitated, clearly torn between whatever bonding moment he’d just gone through with Naruto and his overwhelming loyalty to Zabuza, and Kakashi took advantage of the hesitation like the champ he was to a) separate him from the two of his students _not_ being held at knife point and b) hold him at knife point himself.

“Really?” I asked, sotto voice. What happened. We were doing so well earlier in the chapter. Now look at us.

“We both know you’re going to lose this stalemate, Kakashi,” Zabuza rumbled. “You remember how I got my name, don’t you?” He moved the kunai until it was digging in to the side of my neck to emphasise his point, and I tensed further. I could make snarky comments, but the truth was this was not a good situation. Zabuza could and _would_ sacrifice Haku if he had to, and he wouldn’t hesitate to kill me as he did it. I couldn’t kawarimi out - he was holding me too closely, I’d only take him with me - and my weapons pouch was still lying on the floor where Haku had taken it from me. I didn’t have any jutsu I could use, and my taijutsu wouldn’t be good enough even if I wasn’t already starting at a disadvantage.

I was relying entirely on Kakashi.

There was a long, fraught silence.

“Saa,” Kakashi said, vanishing his kunai into one of his myriad pockets and stepping back from Haku with a mimic of his usual slouch. It sat wrong on him, like an ill-fitting jacket, or a movement he'd seen someone else do once from a distance. “We were only hired to escort Tazuna-san back to his home. I decided to take my students on a separate training trip, but our mission ended a while back.”

“What - Kakashi-dick-sensei - _mmph_!” Sakura muffled Naruto’s protests with a hand over his mouth, eyes wide as she stared between us.

“Is that so?” Zabuza asked suspiciously, not relaxing his grip in the slightest. I didn’t blame him - what Kakashi was doing was unthinkable. Abandoning a mission to save a teammate, not just a teammate but a stupid wet behind the ears _genin_ , that was the sort of thing that started wars, tanked a man’s reputation, drove him to suicide, and completely fucked up his only son.

As a completely non-specific example.

“Mm,” Kakashi agreed. He looked one step from pulling his book out. “Curious though. We ran across this businessman while we were training. Kaito, Sato, Ito - can’t remember his name. Tried to hire us, said he had a couple of ninja already on the payroll but he was planning to double cross them and keep their wages. Interesting offer.”

Behind me, Zabuza was very, very still.

“I said no, of course,” Kakashi continued blithely. “I was busy. There was this little old lady who needed to cross the road.” He eye smiled, then, still moving in a way that was oddly Kakashi-not-Kakashi, turned and started walking away with one hand raised in a lazy farewell. “Missed opportunities, perhaps. C’mon kids, home time.”

No one moved. I was pretty sure my heart wasn’t beating, I was _not moving_ that hard. Haku had frozen with a poleaxed look of confusion on his face, and I wondered somewhat hysterically if he’d forgotten he wasn’t wearing his mask.

“You’re lying,” Zabuza said.

Kakashi didn’t even slow down, still casually sauntering away. “Hm? Oh, no. She needed to get to the fish market.”

“He’s lying,” Zabuza repeated in a snarl.

“It would fit with what we’ve seen,” Haku said, shifting his weight uncomfortably. “Perhaps we should be certain before we proceed?” He very studiously didn’t look at me. Naruto, staring alternately at everyone in turn, gaped at him incredulously.

“Munchkins!” Kakashi summoned, practically halfway up the bridge. “Chop chop.”

“Um,” I said, still very carefully Not Moving. “Is it ok if I go? Only he’s Kakashi, he tends to hold grudges.”

Zabuza blinked down at me as if he’d forgotten I was there, then snorted and shoved me away from him. I was instantly surrounded by not only Naruto and Sakura but also half a dozen dogs, which startled me - I hadn’t realised the summons were still around.

“Scram,” Zabuza said. “Sharingan no Kakashi, huh.”

“Heel, pups,” the littlest dog commanded, trotting out in front with a wary glance at Haku as we went past. It said a lot for how shaken the three of us were that none of us protested, just shuffled after him with our massive fluffy entourage. I was - my brain was - at some point I'd realise that if Zabuza hadn't let me go I'd've probably died, but just then it was too big to comprehend and my thoughts were flat lining when they tried.

We followed the dogs down the entire length of the bridge, past the area where we’d been fighting - the workers, I noticed, were gone. Haku? Surely he hadn’t had time. I hoped they were safe, but then again according to Kakashi they weren’t our problem anymore.

“Sensei?”

“Not now, Sakura,” Kakashi said in the same pleasant-wrong tone of voice he’d used on the bridge. I hunched my shoulders and tried to hide behind the giant bulldog.

“But Kakashi-sensei, you weren’t serious about -”

“Not now, Naruto.” He turned off the path, leading us to a small clearing in the wood, and sat cross legged on the floor.

We hovered uncertainly until he raised his eyebrow. His forehead protector was back over his sharingan, though I hadn’t seen him move it. “Sit,” he said.

We sat. The bulldog did not, standing close enough behind me that I could feel the warmth radiating from it. It was almost taller than I was when I was standing; sitting, it dwarfed me, and I resolutely did not think about how I was more of a cat person.

“Sakura. Status report.”

Her back was ramrod straight, hands folded neatly in her lap. If it wasn’t for the way her hair was half pulled out of its braid and her entire appearance was scuffed, sweaty and covered in bridge dust, she’d look like she was sat at a formal dinner. Maybe an execution. “Bruising to my right knuckles,” she listed. “Aches in both shoulders and my right forearm, though no strained or pulled muscles. Minor heat burn to my left elbow.”

“Naruto. Status report.” He didn’t give any acknowledgement of Sakura’s answer. It was terrifying.

“Um, I’m, fine?”

“Sasuke. Status report.”

My mouth was dry. “Temporary concussion, no lingering effects. Minor burns to my mouth and the fingers of my left hand. Shallow cut to my left thigh, no evidence of poison, no limited mobility.” It was, I think, the most professional status report I’d ever given in my life.

Again, Kakashi didn’t acknowledge the answer, just stared off into the trees with his face perfectly, unmovingly blank. “Sakura,” he said. “Team leader is a serious position with many duties attached. One of those is to decide the best course of action for the team as a whole, another is to resolve problems internally to the best of your ability before bringing an issue to your superior and taking responsibility for it. For you, these duties are theoretical; your role as team leader is not recognised outside this team and you have no authority to act on any decisions you make regarding it.”

She blanched, but kept her stiff position. Kakashi turned his head towards her without changing the angle of his shoulders. “That being said, I am inside the team and therefore recognise your position, and also have the authority to enact your decisions. So: is Sasuke fit to continue as a member of Team Seven, would he be better placed in the genin corps, or should he be relieved of his headband and returned to a civilian role?”

My stomach fell through the bottom of my feet.

“Sensei, you can’t -!”

“Be quiet, Naruto. You aren’t the team leader; I asked Sakura.”

I stared at the grass. It felt like my thoughts should have been racing, running through the consequences of what was happening, complaining that this wasn’t fair to Sakura even if it was fair to me, screaming something incomprehensible about eyeballs and Danzo and Itachi and - but they weren’t. I fucked up. I not only fucked up, I fucked up in a way that nearly made Kakashi repeat one of the most traumatic moments of his life, made him throw the mission, and almost got several people killed.

My mind was filled with the mental equivalent of a melted ice cream, drooping and hanging just on the edge of the cone, and when it inevitably fell I’d start crying and wasn’t sure if I’d be able to stop.

I waited for Sakura’s decision.

“Sasuke… acts recklessly,” she finally said. The lack of -kun was an almost physical blow. “He places himself in unnecessary danger, not just today, but… since we left the village. His plans rely on big risks paying off when there are safer options available, and he…” She hesitated, then ploughed on. “He is more affected than he lets on by his past and by the realities of ninja life.” By the realities of - oh. The meat. She thought I didn’t eat meat because I struggled with people dying. She was right, but. It sounded bad when she said it like that.

“And your verdict?” Kakashi asked calmly. I fought the urge to flinch.

“I would not recommend he join Team Seven,” Sakura said slowly, and the melted ice cream in my brain slipped in a pathetic heap and landed in the mud. I closed my eyes and tried to breathe around the lump in my throat and hoped that at least I’d cry quietly.

“Sakura-chan!” Naruto yelped, sounding distraught and betrayed.

“Very well,” Kakashi said, still unreadable. I kidded myself that I heard a trace of disappointment, but - actually, he probably was disappointed. I was a disappointment. I was so much worse than a disappointment, but disappointed was the only word I could think of. “When we return to Konoha -”

“But,” Sakura interrupted, and Kakashi stopped abruptly. She swallowed. “But, as team leader I have to consider what is best for the team as a whole. And I wouldn’t recommend Sasuke _join_ Team Seven, but I think it would do irreparable damage if he were to leave it.”

The world stopped. Everything froze, and when I snapped my eyes open and stared at her, I felt like I could see in slow motion. She wasn’t looking at me, but she’d asked - she’d said - I read every twitch of her facial expression searching for a deception, but I couldn’t find one. There wasn’t one. She wasn’t - she was throwing me a lifeline that I didn’t deserve and taking a risk for me that could, potentially, drag her whole career down with me.

I cannot even begin to describe to you what I felt in response to that.

I blinked, and the world shifted out of its hyperfocus and back to normal speed. Kakashi had an eyebrow raised at Sakura, but he looked thoughtful, rather than angry.

“When we return to Konoha,” he continued, picking up the sentence Sakura had interrupted, “I am going to nominate the three of you for the chunin exams. Naruto and Sasuke, I do not expect you to get promoted and will argue against any promotions you are given. Sakura, I expect to see you in a vest by the summer festival.” He got seamlessly to his feet while the three of us stared at him, unsure if we’d heard correctly. Meaning was surprisingly difficult to pick up when someone spoke with no inflections.

We were still staring when he started walking away, then looked over his shoulder with a quizzical frown. “Are you coming? Tsunami-san will be cooking dinner.” He didn't wait for our response, just turned away again and kept walking, leaving the three of us still sat on the floor in stunned silence.

“Puppies,” the smallest dog - Pakkun, my brain numbly supplied - said, standing up with a languid stretch. “Shift. You ran around a lot, you need feeding.” He waited for us to get up with various levels of shell shocked, then trotted after Kakashi with his curled tail held high.

“Sakura,” I said, but she stopped me with a sharp motion.

“Don’t. Sorry, Sasuke-kun, just… don’t. Not right now.”

I felt wobbly and close to tears but also drained and exhausted, as though I’d run an emotional marathon in the last ten minutes. “Ok,” I said. “I - yeah, ok. Sorry.”

She nodded and followed after Pakkun, still holding herself perfectly straight. It made her look stretched thin and fragile, and I bit my lip against my guilt.

“C’mon, bastard,” Naruto said, bumping me with his shoulder. “Food. You’re grumpy when you’re hungry."

“Yeah,” I said again, offering him a wan smile. The bulldog nosed my other shoulder and, surrounded by the rest of Kakashi’s pack, we went back to Tazuna’s house.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Pakkun: Pup -  
> ANBU Hound: Not now, Pakkun.
> 
> (imma go hide now but i hope you liked the chapter)


	13. Chapter 13

We trained the next day. No watch, no guard duty, we weren’t even training near the bridge - we were in the forest again, in another clearing. Kakashi stayed with us long enough in the morning to take us there and set up who was working with who and what on, but vanished shortly after. I wasn’t sure if he was patrolling again, or investigating Gato - which he must’ve done at some point before if he knew that Haku and Zabuza were going to be betrayed. Maybe he was back by the bridge, keeping an eye on Tazuna and his crew. Or maybe he’d meant it when he told Zabuza that our mission was finished. He hadn’t said anything to Tazuna either way, unless he’d done it when we weren’t there, and none of us really wanted to ask.

As for Tazuna himself, he - and his crew, once they’d woken up from their senbon induced bouts of unconsciousness - were taking the whole experience as a massive boost in morale. Something about Gato showing he was scared by making a move on them, combined with the fact that they’d all survived and only lost a few tools and an easily repairable section of bridge in the process. Tazuna had been practically bouncing at breakfast as he’d recounted to a dubious Inari how the village was all but saved and there was nothing Gato could do if they all banded together. His optimism was sweet, even if the reasoning behind it was naive.

But for us: we trained. The dogs stayed; I don’t know where they slept over night or what they ate, but they were there when we left the house in the morning and five of them were there in the forest clearing. The sixth, a bandaged greyhound called Uhei, didn’t join us - I think he was guarding the house, but I wasn’t sure.

“Taijutsu,” Kakashi said to Naruto. “No clones, no weapons. Your movements need to be sharper and more precise, and you need to be able to do your katas faster and without having to think about the positions.” He showed him a different set of katas to practice from the ones he was currently using, told him that the dogs knew the moves and would correct him if he was wrong, and moved on.

To Sakura: “Strength training. You’re putting more chakra behind your punches than your muscles can cope with, it’s why they keep hurting. Focus on your core muscles today and practice using your whole body to power your attacks rather than just your arms. You can train your upper body tomorrow once your shoulders have recovered.” Again, he demonstrated for her, and cautioned her to cycle between exercises to avoid over straining one area.

And to me: “Kunai and close combat. You rely too much on shuriken; they aren’t suited to be a contact weapon. Improve your deflections, and stop letting people disarm you - or get used to hiding weapons in places other than your pouch.” The style he wanted me to learn was fast and vicious, with almost no blocking compared to the academy basic and a much heavier focus on ending a fight in as few moves as possible.

And… that was it. For the whole day, we ran drills, tightening the fundamentals of the new forms we were taught and letting the entire world narrow down to the next movement, the next step, the next duck and stab and parry and strike.

It was almost meditative, so much so that it took me a moment to blink out of it when Pakkun called a break for lunch.

“Walk,” he commanded, gesturing us to take a lap round the clearing. “You can eat when you’ve cooled off.”

“Walking?” Naruto complained, falling obediently into line behind Sakura. “This is the worst training session _ever._ Hey, hey we should spar after lunch, right?”

“No sparring! You need to improve, so you’ll improve. It’s how training works.”

“Yeah,” Naruto reasoned, “but we can _also_ improve with sparring. And not be bored. It’s training, but better.”

“The variety would be good, Pakkun-san,” Sakura added. The pug wrinkled his nose.

“I’m a dog,” he reminded her. “I’m not a san. Only cats and people need titles to feel important.”

“Except people are important if they’re someone’s banana,” Naruto said happily, making grabby hands at Bull for his bento. It wasn’t quite the take home message I’d meant to give him yesterday, but a lot of things happened that I didn’t mean so I didn’t correct him. “C’mon, sparring. It’s good. It’s fun. I promise to just use taijutsu so it’s still training.”

“No sparring. But,” Pakkun relented, “we can do a different form of training if you’re bored.”

The other two perked up, even if Sakura was less obvious about it. So, I noticed, did the dogs. Shiba, a grey dog who wasn’t a shiba inu despite her name, started grinning, tongue lolling out her mouth and tail quivering with suppressed wags. She barked a one-word question.

“Yes,” Pakkun said, nodding sagely. “Puppies, today you learn how to fetch.”

And with _that_ ominous prediction hanging over us, he left us to enjoy the next ten minutes of our lunch break and wonder among ourselves what, exactly, a game of fetch with a pack of ninja dogs would entail.

Turns out: a stick, a lot of chasing, ambush attacks, and the desperate fear of realising that Bisuke and Guruko could climb trees.

Inari accosted me outside the bathroom again when I’d taken too long staring into space with the tap running.

“Sorry,” I said, stepping aside. “All yours.”

“I asked Grandpa about the sweets,” he said in reply, and I blinked at him. There weren’t any sweets in Wave. I hadn’t had sugar in days. Why was he talking about sweets. “And he said that’s the basics of it, but you haven’t understood.”

“I haven’t?” I repeated. Inari huffed and crossed his arms, adopting a lecturing pose that looked slightly ridiculous. Particularly because the person he’d learnt it off was clearly taller than him, and the stern expression didn’t translate well when he had to look up to keep eye contact with me.

“It’s not about the sweets,” he said. “It’s about the _enocomy_. Enocomy is people having jobs and houses and food and shops, and if your enocomy is strong then your people are strong and _that’s_ why the bridge is important. Because heroes don’t work. You need, um, sustainable trade routes to save people.”

“You mean economy?” I guessed, still trying to work out how this related to me being wrong.

“And!” he continued, abandoning his old-man-teacher pose and pointing rudely at my face. “Sweets are a luxury item! People need to not be hungry first, _then_ you can start import-ering for sweets, but if you waste all your money on mochi without leaving enough for rice you’ll get sick and your mum will be sad!”

I… what? Last week Inari informed us all that there were no heroes, only people stupid enough to get themselves killed. Now there were no heroes, only rice traders?

“My mum’s dead,” I said uncertainly. “But thank you for the advice.” I shook my head, putting his weirdness out of my mind, and started walking down the hall to dinner. “Ask Naruto about heroes. He knows more than I do.”

Inari scrunched his face up into a pout and tagged along beside me, twisting a hand in the hem of my shirt and tugging until I slowed to match his pace. “I don’t want to ask him,” he said. “He’s an idiot. Grandpa says he’s not allowed to work on the bridge because he doesn’t know what girders are.”

“He still knows more than I do.”

“Yeah, but he’s an _idiot_. If I sit next to you will you teach me another swear word?”

“I’m not - _another_ swear word? No. You’ll get me in trouble again.”

“I’ll trade you for taxes? Grandpa told me all about taxes.”

“That’s a shit trade.”

“Is shit a swear word?”

“ _No._ ”

The lack of night watches should have been a good thing. I didn’t _like_ being up in the middle of the night, having to sleep in clothes to be ready to go at a moment’s notice, staring out into the dark and trying to find the right balance of alert-not-paranoid to last for hours at a time. With Kakashi and the dogs taking charge of patrols, we were left to ourselves for the evenings. I shared a slightly more involved stretching routine with Sakura than the one she was currently using, both of us united against the unfairness of Naruto never feeling the ache after training sessions, Naruto and Sakura speculated about what the other teams were up to and whether any of them would’ve seen combat like we had. Some topics we carefully steered around, some we openly ignored, but overall the downtime was good. It helped. We were relaxing back into being a cohesive team again, smoothing out the tension that lingered after the bridge into something - not perfect, but. Good.

It was good.

It was also well past midnight and, for the third night in a row, I missed being on night watches. I stared at the ceiling with my thoughts in a tangled mess that I didn’t want to look at and tried to run through katas to make my head be quiet. It wasn’t working.

“Bet you thought you set the bar pretty low,” I murmured, thinking of canon-Sasuke and the way he’d screwed up his version of the timeline. I hadn’t stuck my hand through Naruto’s chest yet, but that was about all I had going for me. “You probably didn’t expect me to get us kicked off the team. Almost kicked off the team. Stupid civilian, making you look like an idiot because she can’t ninja properly. Put herself in front of an assassination jutsu and got taken hostage twice in one day, who does that.”

I bit my lip and misjudged it, breaking the skin and tasting blood. It wasn’t a huge amount but I was feeling restless, so I pushed myself out of bed and padded out to the bathroom to wash it clean. Then… I don’t know, I just didn’t want to go back. I needed to be outside. Clear my head. Maybe do some more training, see if running through the katas in real life instead of mentally would shut down my spinning thoughts.

Bull fell in step with me halfway to the clearing we’d been using. I brushed my shoulder against his in a silent hello and kept walking. It wasn’t until we reached the break in the trees and I dropped into a ready stance that I realised how unprepared I was to train; I was barefoot, had no weapon pouch and no sleeves, and my pyjamas were baggy and loose. If I did a handstand my top would end up falling over my head and probably strangle me. I could take it off, but then my flat chest would be on display with no bandages to hide it behind, and right at that moment I didn’t have the energy to convince myself I was a boy or deal with the fact that I was in the wrong body.

It was so _stupid._ Everything else that was happening, and I was still hung up on the fact that in my old life I was a girl. I’d had five years to get used to it. I should be _over_ it by now. I was too pale, my hair was wrong, my features were all sharp angles and high cheekbones instead of the soft roundness I’d had before - hell, I didn’t even have _freckles_ anymore. That was fine. I was fine. I didn’t care. Even the penis was useful sometimes. But apparently the chest was where I drew the line, despite the fact that I was _twelve_ and wouldn’t have much there anyway even if I was a girl, but it still mattered, because, because -

Fuck knows. Because I’m stupid. Because it’s stupid. Because.

There was a rustle on the edge of the clearing, the sort of deliberate noise a ninja makes to let someone know they’re there. I tensed, scrambling to my feet and positioning myself so Bull was at my back.

“Sorry,” Haku said, stepping out from under the trees. “I didn’t mean to startle you.”

“Haku?” I asked incredulously, dropping into a hesitant defensive position and regretting my lack of weapons even more. “What are you doing here?”

He lifted the basket he was carrying, showing the neatly bundled plants laid in it. “I was gathering some supplies,” he said. “Zabuza-sama and I are leaving in the morning.” I sensed someone behind me, but didn’t want to risk taking my eyes off Haku. Bull didn’t react, so I guessed they were one of the other dogs and ignored them.

“And what, you just came to say goodbye? We’re not friends.”

“No,” he said wistfully. “Though I’ve met a lot of ninja, and they are rarely kind. Perhaps we would’ve been under different circumstances.”

“Konoha doesn’t make a habit of befriending missing nin,” Kakashi said, surprising me with quite how close he was standing. Not a dog, then. Also, from the thinly veiled threat in his tone, not feeling very forgiving at the moment. Haku, to his credit, didn’t seem phased by having a jounin warn him off.

“Of course,” he said, dipping his head in a polite bow. “Your information was correct, Kakashi-san. Gato has no plans to pay us, and we have no plans to work for free. The bridge builder is not under threat from us.”

Kakashi didn’t respond. Haku smiled again, sad and somewhat rueful, and disappeared back into the trees with a last nod at me and a soundless leap.

“Kakashi-sensei?” I asked quietly when Kakashi stayed where he was. He looked down at me, then turned and started walking back to the house. I followed, Bull a comforting warmth at my side.

“Why were you out so late?”

I kept my head tilted down, watching his ankles rather than risk seeing his expression. “I couldn’t sleep. I thought training would help.” Thankfully, he didn’t comment on my choice of training clothes. He didn’t comment on anything else, in fact, until we were back at the house and he’d led us past it and down to a series of ponds that ringed the paved courtyard out the back.

“They aren’t big on plants in Wave,” he said. “Someone told me that the trees grew when it was much further inland, but as the sea got closer the salt poisoned the soil. Not much grows outside the forest.”

I made a vague sound of acknowledgement and tried not to show how confused I was. Kakashi sat by one of the ponds and Bull stretched out next to him, flopping onto his side with a satisfied whuff. He cocked his head at me and lifted a paw invitingly until I sat down, stroking a cautious hand over his surprisingly soft fur.

“Still,” Kakashi continued. “Water gardens can be just as beautiful. Maybe Tazuna will be able to repair his when the bridge is finished.”

I squinted at the ponds. They were somewhat overgrown, but there was indeed a collection of smooth stones that looked deliberately placed, and some larger leaves floating on the water that might belong to lotus plants. It could, conceivably, be a garden. “I’m sure it’s on his to do list,” I offered uncertainly.

We lapsed back into silence. After a while I resettled myself so I was leaning more heavily against Bull to steal his warmth, shifting my hands to lazily scratch behind his ear. It wasn’t quite the same as katas, but it was similar. Soothingly repetitive. Quiet.

“Do you know why I said I wouldn’t allow you or Naruto to be promoted to chunin?”

I paused in my scratching, frowning slightly at the unexpected question. “So we won’t be disappointed when we aren’t good enough?” I hazarded.

“You are, actually,” Kakashi corrected. I frowned deeper, and he raised his eyebrow at me. “Maa, so doubtful. Your taijutsu is low to average chunin level. Your stealth is easily high chunin - I couldn’t detect you after Haku sent you away at the bridge. I thought you’d gone. Your ninjutsu… I need to teach you more, but you use what you have well. It’s not a question of skill.”

As far as frank appraisals went, that was the most positive I’d ever had. I wasn’t counting the academy - they’d had an annoying habit of treating me as the fabled last Uchiha, I was never sure I’d actually earned my rookie of the year status. But if Kakashi had laid all of that out, it meant that it wasn’t the lesson he wanted me to learn. I put it aside and tried to think through what I knew of chunin and why he thought Sakura was ready and we weren’t.

Besides the obvious of me fucking up and Naruto still recovering from years of misinformation and negligence.

“Sakura’s a leader,” I said slowly. “She’s good at making plans.” He hummed, turning back to the pond. “She’s good at making plans for all of us,” I amended. “She thinks about the team, not just her part of what she needs to do.”

“She does,” he agreed. “Chunin are often asked to lead teams, even ones they aren’t familiar with. She might not be as strong as you or Naruto, but she knows how to use other people’s strength to complete the mission.”

“Yet,” I said. “She’s not as strong yet. She’s going to get stronger though.”

“And you aren’t?” I didn’t have an answer to that. I think if I were following canon I’d’ve unlocked my sharingan and be using it to hoard jutsus, but I wasn’t following canon. I wasn’t even sure I wanted to, any more. “People used to be promoted much earlier,” Kakashi said, moving past it. “Sometimes as young as six if they could fight well. If they were on a team they usually operated under a more experienced team leader, but a lot of them ended up on solo missions.”

I turned to face him, leaning forward in interest. The war - he was talking about the war. After the war as well; Itachi had been chunin at six, hadn’t he?

“The thing about solo missions is you can’t screw up. The mission doesn’t allow it. If you make a mistake and fix it, then you haven’t screwed up. If you can’t fix it, you die. No one gets a second chance. And all these chunin, when they were integrated back into normal teams, they were all the ones who’d survived. Who’d never allowed themselves to fail. They were the fastest, the strongest, the luckiest; they went so long without backup they thought they had to be invincible. Maybe not consciously, but it’s impossible to survive that much from that young without it leaving a mark.”

He looked at me then, and I could barely breathe under the weight of his gaze.

“Invincible people take risks. Some of them were too confident because they’d always been lucky before and it made them careless, with their lives and with their teams. Some of them were too scared. They still believed they’d die if they failed, and if every risk goes bad in the same way then there’s no downside to being reckless.” He paused, tilting his head. “It’s surprisingly freeing, to know you won’t be around to see the consequences of your mistakes.”

Then, without even acknowledging that, he continued. “Once they were integrated back into teams these chunin were running easier, safer missions than they’d ever done before - and they died on them, exactly as if they’d still been on solo missions. Except now, their teams died with them. They _kept_ dying until the Hokage passed a law raising the graduation age, because people who learn too young that they have to be invincible have a hard time unlearning it. Do you understand?”

I nodded, then stilled my head and frowned. “I - yes. But I don’t think I’m invincible, that’s not…?” I knew I made mistakes. Wasn’t that the problem?

“Isn’t it?” Kakashi asked. I frowned harder in confusion and he elaborated. “Your entire clan died and you’re still here. _You_ died, and you’re still here. That’s how you described it, isn’t it? You died but it didn’t stick. Everyone else at the academy was going home to their parents, but you looked after yourself. You were the best in class, and now you’re the best on the team. I told you that your skills were easily chunin and you didn’t blink, because you know it’s true. Why doesn’t that count?”

Because he was comparing me to kids and I was an adult. Because when I said I died and it didn’t stick, I meant that literally and not in the genjutsu sense he thought. Because Itachi killed the clan but he loved me too much to hurt me. Because all these things I’d supposedly achieved, they didn’t matter because I hadn’t achieved them honestly. Because however strong he thought I was, I wasn’t strong _enough_ , and that was the only reason I could conceivably say out loud so that’s the one I said.

“Why do you have to be?” he countered.

“Because -” I stopped, frustrated. Because I was the one who knew what was going to happen, but I couldn’t _say that_. Because when canon got fucked, I had to be the one to fix it because it was my fault when it changed and no one else would know anything was wrong. _Because._

“Everyone has to be stronger, don’t they?” I snapped. “It’s how you survive.”

“And yet Sakura’s the one who’s closest to being chunin.”

“But -” I stopped again. Sakura wasn’t as strong as me individually. Kakashi wanted me to realise that she used the strengths of people around her to make up for it. That _I_ should use the strengths of people around me and stop relying on myself. It was the same fucking teamwork lesson he’d been hammering home since the bell test, and what he didn’t get was that it didn’t _work_.

Didn’t it? No. It didn’t. I had too many secrets. It wasn’t safe. He was talking about taking too many risks, but the irony was that by keeping it to myself I was _not_ risking it and that was the whole point.

Wasn’t it? I couldn’t tell them. No one would - who _tells_ people things like that. You sit on them, and you stress, and then you get over it and save the world.

By yourself.

Because you couldn’t trust your team to keep you safe.

His hand on my head startled me out of my thoughts and I looked up at him with wide eyes. “Maa,” he said. “It’s normal for genin not to pass the chunin exams on their first try. It’s more for practice than anything else.” He smiled at me, eye dipping into the familiar crescent U. “You’ll pass later, Sasuke-kun.”

It felt like a peace offering, and I put my growing doubts about my choices aside and offered him a tentative smirk. “You say that now,” I said, “But there’s still a month to go, right? Me and Naruto could surprise you.”

“Is that so? He is Konoha’s number one unpredictable knucklehead, I suppose. Saa, do you want to learn a jutsu? It makes just enough light to read by, but it’s a pain to hold the jutsu and the book at the same time.”

“Wha - Kakashi-sensei, I’m not lighting up your _porn._ ”

Bull gave a soft _bork_ of agreement and I snuggled back into him in satisfaction as Kakashi visibly drooped. There was still something fragile there, but… I don’t know, better? Yeah, better. Still complicated, I still fucked up, but it didn’t feel like I was going to get dropped from the team if I breathed wrong. Maybe Kakashi never meant to drop me. I didn’t know what he’d’ve done if Sakura hadn’t chosen to keep me.

I had a sudden image of myself as a civilian, dressed in impractical, pretty clothes, tearing out the poisons in my garden and replacing them with an unashamedly bright array of flowers. Orange ones. Pink. Red roses, with tight spirals of petals around a dark centre.

“Would you really have taken my headband?” I asked before I could stop myself, the words spilling out into the quiet calm. I froze, then forced myself not to react.

“Ah, maybe,” Kakashi said, eye-smiling back at me. “You never know, it might have made you tall.”

I pulled a face, allowing myself to relax again. “Yeah, laugh it up,” I grumbled. “Like your dream was any better.” I tried to think what he’d said back at the introduction on the academy roof, then frowned when I remembered. “You didn’t even have one,” I accused. “At least tall is better than that.”

“I didn’t, did I?” he mused. “Well. If your dream is to be tall then I guess mine must be to be short.”

“Sensei.”

“Just you wait, Sasuke. One day I’ll be shorter than all three of my cute little genin. It’s my new life ambition.”

“Sensei no.”

“Maa, you wouldn’t deny old sensei his dream, would you?”

“ _I_ wouldn’t be the one denying it. People don’t grow _down_.”

“I could try,” he said cheerfully, and I huffed, but this time when I leaned back against Bull and occupied my hands with providing belly rubs, my thoughts were steady.

I wasn’t going to be like his too-young chunin. I had a team, we were going to get stronger together, and even if I kept the most dangerous of my secrets to myself I wasn’t going to try and save the world on my own. I’d be better than that.

Gato’s death was announced the next day. Wave celebrated. People cheered in the streets. Inari followed through on his threat to teach me about taxes and forced me to sit and listen while he recounted how reinvestment in infrastructure would ensure a fair distribution of wealth - or something along those lines; he still wasn’t sure on some of the words.

What he _was_ sure on was that the money Gato had extorted from Wave rightfully belonged to the people and not to the remaining few thugs hanging round his property. Tazuna apparently had plans to develop the road network once the bridge was finished, so that heavily laden carts and wagons could reach the various shops and businesses they needed to get to without needing to be unloaded first.

“And,” he told me later, barely remembering to hang back a safe distance while I went through my katas, “And Grandpa said Gato had _so much money_ that we could even put up a memorial in the town square, right, for my dad and for everyone who didn’t give up and all the people Gato hurt so that they can see that we beat him and he’d teach me how to carve some of the names in the stone, how cool is that?”

“Very cool,” I agreed absently, trying to use my chakra to work a shuriken free from the tree it was stuck in on the other side of the clearing. I’d put the wire aside for now, but I’d discovered - annoyingly - that if I added just a bit of water into the kawarimi tendrils I reached out with, it enhanced the solidity of the chakra enough that I could almost use it as an extra hand.

A clumsy, fingerless hand with the grip strength of a geriatric pheasant, but. You know. A hand.

“You’re not _listening._ ”

I buried a grimace. It was good, I reminded myself, that Inari had come out of his shell. Still, though. I hadn’t got any better with kids.

“You convinced the village to rise up against the thugs and take back everything Gato took from you,” I dutifully recited. “Kakashi let you borrow the dogs and everything was amazing and when you grow up you’re going to make sure no one ever attacks the village again.”

Ninja situational awareness. It had many uses.

“Yeah but you weren’t listening properly.”

The shuriken came loose and drifted erratically back towards my hand. “I’m busy,” I told him bluntly. “Go bother someone else, I have to train.”

“You’re _always_ training though, and you’re not even going to be here for long.” He sounded almost back to his previous levels of pouty at that, and I spared a frustrated glance over at where he was sitting next to Bull. Naruto and Sakura were on the other side of the training field, running through a Pakkun-supervised taijutsu spar, and Kakashi was, presumably, out patrolling while Tazuna’s crew put the finishing touches on the bridge.

“I have to train,” I explained, trying to leave as little room for argument as possible. “I’m a ninja, I need to be able to protect people.”

“Grandpa wouldn’t make you be a ninja,” he said sulkily. “You could stay and protect people by reducing unemploryment.”

“Yeah, well.” I shrugged, awkward but unmoving. “The world doesn’t work like that. Are you going to let me practice or are you going to go home and keep whining out of earshot?”

He glowered at me but sunk stubbornly down until he was practically on the floor he was slouching that much. Behind him, Bull gave an amused _whuff_ and resettled himself to be a comfier pillow.

“Good enough,” I muttered, and turned back to my shurikens.

Of course, given that we were now on an extended training mission as per Kakashi’s ground rules after the debacle at the bridge, it was entirely coincidence that we set off for home the day after the bridge itself was done. Sheer lucky happenstance. What mysterious ways the universe works in. Why Tazuna was trying to credit us by naming the bridge after us, I honestly couldn’t say.

“The Great Ninja Battle Bridge!” he proclaimed cheerfully.

“Saa, that’s bad luck, isn’t it?” Kakashi said, awkwardly scratching his cheek through his mask. “You don’t want to scare people away from it.”

“Something this grand needs a name to live up to,” Tazuna protested. “But if you don’t like Battle Bridge… The Awesome Sharingan no Kakashi Bridge of Doom!”

You could literally see Kakashi shrivel up and die inside.

“Dog Bridge,” Pakkun suggested.

“Konoha Bridge, believe it!”

“But it’s not in Konoha. And it doesn’t lead to Konoha. It’s in Wave.”

“The Seven Bridge?” Sakura suggested. “Seven is our team, and it’s also a lucky number.”

“The Lucky Seven Bridge,” Tazuna repeated with a satisfied huff. “For the lucky Team Seven who saw it be built. Wave will never forget what you did! You’ll be heroes here, for as long as the bridge stands!” He beamed at all of us, so infectiously positive that both Sakura and Naruto stood straighter and even Kakashi stopped trying to fade through the floor.

I resettled my bag on my shoulders and gave a noncommittal hn of acknowledgement. Tazuna’s views of what made a hero clearly didn’t match up with mine. Looking away from him though made my gaze land on Inari, whose eyes were shining as he tried not to cry.

I felt a brief stab of guilt. He’d never got the talk he needed from Naruto, had he? Though he’d been doing better recently, probably in reaction to Tazuna’s incessessant cheer at the bridge’s progress. I waved hesitantly as everyone said their goodbyes and watched him wave back with far too much enthusiasm, and hoped that Tazuna would be enough for him.

“Alright,” Kakashi said once we were on the road. “It took us five days to get here, travelling with a civilian and sticking to known roads. How long does it take us to get back?”

“Three?” Naruto guessed. Sakura paused, working through her calculations, then nodded in confirmation.

“Maa, that’s pretty slow,” Kakashi said. “Maybe you need a better incentive… Shiba?”

The grey dog practically vibrated to attention. “Oh god,” I said, as both Sakura and Naruto sprang forward into a sprint with wide eyes.

“Fetch,” Kakashi finished gleefully, and I kawarimid with the furthest rock I could find and left the other two in the dust. Those who abandoned their team were less than trash but Shiba was _vicious._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> \- Endeth the Wave Arc -
> 
> Writing emotional scenes in first person is. A lot. But I'm so unbelievably overwhelmed by all your comments and kudos and everything so <3 to all of you.
> 
> I'm going to take a few days break again to sort out the next few chapters so I'll see you again at the end of the week. Before I go though! If you're not in the habit of reading the comments then they might be worth a peruse; not only are some of you readers hilariously spot on with your call-outs, I also go into a bit more of the things I want to show in the narrative but can't because of using a first person point of view.
> 
> Including, for the last chapter's comments, [a mini AU ficlet of what-if-DANZO](https://archiveofourown.org/comments/301969090) that fakeivy ambushed me with a prompt for. So. Have a nosy if you fancy.


	14. Chapter 14

“Home,” Sakura moaned as Konoha’s gates finally loomed above us.

“I’m going to eat twelve bowls of Ichiraku’s,” Naruto said in fervent agreement.

“And sleep in a real bed. For a _week._ ”

“What was wrong with the beds we had?” I asked, confused. They’d seemed normal to me - if anything, they were comfier than the futon waiting for me in my kitchen-home. Though maybe that was putting our sleeping rolls out on top of them, I could always try that.

“They weren’t beds, bastard. They were big cushions on the floor.”

“That’s what futons are though?”

“Yeah, but you only use futons for guests,” Sakura said, stretching lazily. “And guests don’t usually stay for a month. Only old people sleep on futons all the time.”

I opened my mouth to deny it, then closed it again with a frown. Now that I thought about it, there were actual beds in the other bedrooms. I’d even slept on one when I was little, before Itachi turned the rest of the house into a place of death that I didn’t use. It was entirely possible that my futon was, in fact, a guest futon. “Oh.”

Pakkun trotted up to give me a sympathetic pat on the foot. “ _I_ like cushions on the floor,” he said. “You’re fine.”

“... Thanks Pakkun.”

“I am a dog though. I’m a lot hardier than you two legged types.”

“ _Thanks_ Pakkun.”

“Hey, where do you sleep?” Naruto asked him, gesturing at the rest of the pack. “Does Kakashi-sensei have, like, a whole room of dog beds for you?”

Garuko gave a short yip that I assumed was meant to be laughter, and Kakashi shot him - and Uhei, who was also sporting a tongue-lolling grin - a quelling look. I immediately pictured all eight dogs piling on top of him and stealing his blanket. “They sleep in the spirit realm, actually,” he said. “Almost all summons do.”

“You’re _summons?_ ” Naruto asked. “I thought summons were - ow, Sakura-chan.”

“Does this mean you won’t be staying when we get back to the village?” she asked, completely ignoring Naruto. Probably wise; none of the dogs seemed the sort to get offended easily, but nobody liked being told they weren’t cool enough to be a summons. Or whatever adjective Naruto had been going for. Big, maybe? Konoha had a bad habit of romanticising summons because of the sannin, but in truth most of them were small and rarely used in battle. Kakashi’s pack was actually pretty damn impressive given how much chakra it would take to call eight individual dogs and anchor them to the physical realm for as long as he had done.

When you put it like that it was something of a surprise he’d kept them around for the whole trip. Was it just easier to have the whole pack rather than one or two, or had Kakashi been that shaken that he needed the extra support? He’d basically run the mission by himself after he’d relegated us to training. Not that there’d been any more fights, but. Still.

“We have our own home,” Pakkun was explaining to Sakura when I tuned back in, and despite myself I felt a twinge of sadness. I’d got used to having Bull around. The others too, but Bull was the one who usually stuck closest, and he was comfy to lean against. “We’ll be around though. It’s not good for puppies to grow up too far from the pack, they go wonky.”

“Maa, so harsh to my cute little students,” Kakashi said. “As if I’d ever let that happen to them.”

“ _You_ were wonky when you were a puppy -”

“And here we are! Back at Konoha, how delightful, say goodbye to the dogs kids they’re going home.” And with an obviously fake eye smile and a casual hand gesture that _barely_ counted as a seal, he dismissed the entire pack in one go.

“Kakashi-dick-sensei!” Naruto complained. One of the chunin on duty disguised his reaction as a sudden cough, and Sakura glared at me.

Rude. Maybe Naruto learnt his bad language by himself, did she ever think of that. He could’ve read it in a book. The back of a ramen packet, even.

We showed our IDs and passed through the usual security checks, but Kakashi stopped us before we could start aiming for the Hokage tower.

“Hospital first, kidlingtons. You need a checkup before you can do anything else.”

“We’re not hurt though,” I pointed out, wrinkling my nose. I hadn’t been back to the hospital since waking up there after the massacre, and I wasn’t keen on breaking my streak.

“Standard procedure,” he chirped. “Shoo.”

The three of us looked at each other. Sakura nodded imperceptibly and put on her best polite little girl smile. “But sensei, don’t you need a checkup as well? Your health is important!”

“Maa,” he waved her off. “I went before we left. Debriefing in an hour, see you at the Hokage’s office. Bye!” And, in an over the top swirl of shunshin leaves, he was gone.

“Naruto?” Sakura asked, raising an eyebrow at him.

He squinted. “He got most of them, but I think I’ve still got a clone in his book.”

“You hide clones in his _porn?_ Naruto!”

“It’s a boring page! Nothing happens on it, he never checks that page!”

“How do you know nothing happens?” I asked and feigned a shocked gasp. “Naruto, did you _read_ it? For shame!”

Both Naruto and Sakura blushed, looking at each other then studiously at the ground. I blinked. I mean, porn was fine if it was written respectfully and exploring sexuality was healthy and all that, but. _Twelve._ “Hospital,” I said, in an only slightly strangled voice. “We should go. Get checked out. Up. Have a checkup.”

“See,” Naruto said, hurrying to walk beside me, “This is why we didn’t include you when we stole it. You’re all innocent.”

I missed a step and nearly stumbled and Sakura flapped a hand at me, her face now so red it clashed with both her dress and her hair at the same time. “Not that that’s a bad thing, Sasuke-kun! You’re really cute! Ah, that is, it’s sweet that you get embarrassed -”

“You’re the ones blushing!”

“Bastard, your ears are bright red.”

“ _Lie._ ”

_Interlude: Kakashi and the Sandaime_

“Yo. Sorry for being late, I had to fight a guy with a sword and save a puppy from a bad man.”

“... That better not be your full mission report, Kakashi. Where are your team?”

“Around. Which mind healer did Sasuke see after watching his brother kill his clan?”

A pause.

“While I’m glad to see you taking an interest in your team, that is a rather alarming request to receive without context. Did -”

“No reason. Just curious. His hospital records only mentioned a four day period of unconsciousness and a general flag for survivor’s guilt.”

“... Do I take it then you disagree with their analysis? Young Sasuke-kun didn’t actually witness any of the murders; his brother knocked him out immediately after he entered the compound. He was retrieved by ANBU and placed under guard before he could be harmed.”

“So none. No mind healer.”

“Kakashi. What are these questions in aid of?”

Another pause, tenser and more heavier than before. One side thinks, but doesn’t say: His brother was loyal, he was never at risk. The other side thinks, but doesn’t say: His brother traumatised him, he's a danger to himself.

When the pause breaks, it’s flippant. “Paperwork.”

“Paperwork.”

“Mm. Can’t find the ones for Naruto getting his shots. Wondered what else was missing.”

“ _Kakashi._ ”

“Ah, if you didn’t like my mission report, I’d best get my team and submit a proper one.”

“If you have reason to believe that one of my ninja is compromised -”

“With all due respect, Hokage-sama, you had him for five years. I’ll schedule the debrief on my way out.”

Turns out, Kakashi was telling the truth; it _was_ standard (if frequently neglected) procedure for a med-nin to check any injuries sustained on a mission, even if all they did was ask enough questions to make sure the correct field treatments were applied and then run a glowing hand over the wound to make sure it’d healed right.

“What would you do if it hadn’t?” I asked, standing stock still and staring ahead as the nurse held her palm by the faint scar over my ribcage.

“It depends how bad it is,” she said. “Sometimes we can fix it, sometimes we need to rebreak things and start again. But don’t worry, Uchiha-kun, you’re all good.” She stepped away and I let my shirt fall gratefully, trying not to let my discomfort show. I don’t think I was too successful - she gave me an amused smile that said she knew _exactly_ how most shinobi felt about the hospital, and I huffed and slunk back to where Naruto and Sakura were waiting at the edge of the room.

“That’s you two all done then,” the nurse continued. “Haruno-chan, remember to keep an eye on how much chakra enhancement you use, but other than that you both seem in good health.” She started tidying up, smiling at us in clear dismissal, and Sakura frowned in confusion.

“Ah, Nurse-san, Naruto took a lot of senbon wounds…?”

“He’ll be fine,” she answered, picking what looked like a random clipboard and angling for a door at the back of the room. “He’s hard to get rid of.” She smiled at us again, and closed the door behind her as she left.

I was completely blind-sided. I’d forgotten how Naruto was treated. A month out of Konoha had spoiled me, apparently, and the return to reality was unpleasantly stark. What if he’d been hurt. What if the senbon had been laced with a slow acting poison. What if he was _dying_ and she was being an accessory to murder because of her stupid prejudices and her tiny fucking _worm brain._

“I’m going to get her fired,” I said, glaring at the door.

“Bastard, no.”

“Bastard _yes_ ,” I hissed. I wasn’t sure how - a nurse was a more difficult target than a sushi-chef - but I knew what she looked like and I was good at stealth, it would be easy enough to get her name and go from there.

“No,” Naruto insisted. I shifted my glare to him, but instead of looking angry like he should he just seemed sad. “It’s not her fault,” he said.

“She just refused you medical treatment,” Sakura cut in. He shrugged, like that was nothing, like it was _normal_ , and I dug my fingers into my fists to stop myself reaching for a shuriken. Or a kunai, I wasn’t fussy. The hospital was full of potential weapons. Chairs, for instance.

“Healing factor, remember? C’mon, we need to go to the Hokage tower.”

He started walking and we followed him to avoid being left behind, but Sakura was still frowning. “We don’t know how your healing works,” she protested. “And what about checking it healed right, she even said that was important. If you heal something wrong you could end up in permanent pain.”

I made a distressed noise and spun on my heel to go back to the room. Naruto caught me with an arm around my chest and used his bigger frame to drag me down the corridor.

“Look, I’m fine, ok?” he said. “It’s not great but I know why it happens and I’m _working_ on it. It’ll be better.”

“When you’re Hokage?” I asked, pulling myself out of his grip with a huff. “That’s bullshit, you deserve better than to have to wait -”

“Sasuke.” He jostled his shoulder against mine and smiled, soft and pleased and fond, and my anger died in my mouth. “Thank you. But we really do need to go, we’ll be late for the debriefing.”

“... Hn.” I’d let it go. For now. Because he wanted me to, and because it seemed rude to upset a smile like that. I caught Sakura’s eye instead then paused in confusion at the way her gaze was darting between us. “What?”

“Nothing,” she said, looking away. “Just a thought. Sorry.” She cleared her throat, then focussed back on Naruto. “Is it to do with what happened in Wave? The jutsu you used when were fighting Haku, the one you said was cursed.”

Sometimes it was easy to forget how smart Sakura was because she spent most of her time in fights punching things really hard until they broke, but then she casually connected the village’s bad treatment of Naruto to chakra she saw him use _literally once_ and you remember that she’s actually terrifying.

Naruto stiffened. “Yeah,” he said. “It’s… not quite a jutsu, um, I…”

“It’s ok,” Sakura said, smiling and projecting a deliberately casual aura. “You don’t have to tell us. Whenever you’re ready.”

“... Yeah,” he said, smiling back, and some of the tenseness fell out both their shoulders. They lapsed into a skin-crawling awkward post-feelings silence and I cast around desperately for a way to break it before it suffocated someone.

“Still going to fight people who insult you.”

“ _No._ ”

“... And following that, we didn’t make contact with either of the enemy ninja again. There were no further disruptions to Tazuna-san’s work until Gato was murdered and some of his thugs attempted to cause problems for the village, but they were driven off without our intervention.”

As far as verbal reports went, Sakura’s was as good as a genin could be expected to give. It didn’t make it any less weird to hear it all laid out; bland, dry, even boring. She’d skipped over the personal things - thankfully - and though I wasn’t _too_ sure what the guidelines were for what did or didn’t need to be included in a report, I’m pretty sure she covered everything.

Naruto’s use of the kyuubi, my issues with drowning, Sakura being put on the spot as team leader and asked to decide if I’d be allowed to stay - these were private things. Team Seven only. Hokage or not, the Sandaime wasn’t on the list of people who were allowed to know.

… Potentially the kyuubi could _maybe_ have counted as a matter of national interest, but if Naruto wasn’t volunteering to share then we were going to respect his wishes and keep spoilers to a minimum because he was our teammate and we were bros like that.

Kakashi clearly agreed, because he didn’t make any move to correct Sakura’s report. He did lift an eyebrow in my direction though, holding it there until I stepped forward and admitted, “I came across Haku in the forest the night before Gato was found dead. He confirmed that Gato wasn’t paying them and that they’d be leaving, but didn’t say anything other than that.”

“Interesting,” the Sandaime said. “And do you know why he sought you out in particular, Sasuke?”

My first response was to say that it was chance that I happened to be the one out that night, but seeing as ninja rarely believed in coincidences I held that back. If I were looking underneath the underneath, the obvious answer would be that I saved his life and he saved mine - though, those were among the details we hadn’t shared. If mission reports covered blow by blow accounts of battles, they’d be… how long was that chapter? Five thousand words? Six? Longer than a mission report would ever want to be.

But though I could explain the life saving - Haku saved me because he was soft and I saved him because I was an idiot - that wasn’t enough reason for him to say goodbye. Unless… it was? Not everything had to be four layers deep in backstabbing and conspiracy. “I think he was lonely,” I said slowly. “He wasn’t much older than us, and he told Naruto some of his history. It’s possible that he saw us as being in similar positions and was trying to make a connection based off of that.”

“Hm,” the Hokage said. “You may be right. It’s telling though that he attempted to connect with you two and not with Sakura. I’m not fond of the idea of people poaching my genin.” There was an odd emphasis on the way he said that, combined with an eyebrow raised at Kakashi that made me wonder if I was missing something. Kakashi didn’t react though, and it was probably something from his past so I let it go to focus on the real problem.

Namely: that the Sandaime thought Haku’s entire personality was a lie to lure me and Naruto away from Konoha. Ludicrous. The Hokage admittedly had never _met_ Haku, but I had, and I was offended on his behalf.

“Haku’s not like that, old man Hokage!” Naruto protested, because clearly he was the only other sensible one in the room.

“Plus you’re implying Sakura’s weak,” I said. “Which she isn’t. Haku saw her fight, he’d know that.” The _so would you if you paid attention you moron_ I left unsaid, because he was the head of a violent and brutal military dictatorship, but I didn’t leave it unsaid very _much_ because he was wrong and he needed to know it.

“I apologise, Sakura-chan, I didn’t mean to imply otherwise,” he said, in what I personally thought of as a gratingly unapologetic tone. “Merely that orphaned members of clans known to have powerful kekkei genkei are statistically more likely to be recruitment targets. Whether it was the case here or not, it’s something you three should be aware of, hm?”

“Well, it’s dumb,” Naruto said with his trademark bluntness and crossed his arms for better pouting. “Neither the bastard or I are going anywhere. We’re _Konoha._ ”

I raised my chin in agreement and very carefully didn’t think about my brother. Or canon-Sasuke. Or the less than fanatically loyal thoughts I had towards the Sandaime for allowing the village to treat Naruto the way it did. And the way he encouraged a system that put clan kids so far above civilians it was a miracle Sakura had made it as far as she had. The way he’d had my entire family murdered and used my brother to do it. The way -

I didn’t think, ok. Carefully. These are not the traitorous thoughts you are looking for. Move on.

“I’m glad to hear it,” the Sandaime said with a grandfatherly smile. “And I’m glad to hear that the three of you represented Konoha so well. A mission like that… I should say it’s A-rank, wouldn’t you?” He reached for an official looking seal and stamped it over one of the forms Sakura had filled out under Kakashi’s somewhat helpful direction, then handed it over to her. “Congratulations, Team Seven. An impressive start to your careers.”

Still carefully non-treasonous, I followed the other two into a bow and then out the room. Naruto, I noted sourly, was back to bouncing with excitement, his annoyance completely mollified by the Hokage’s praise. It wasn’t his fault. The Hokage was one of the few people he’d been allowed to interact with before Team Seven happened, he could be forgiven for not holding a grudge.

I, on the other hand, held grudges like a champ. Whatever reason Naruto had for being sad and accepting of the village’s treatment of him instead of yelling in outrage - he’d been angry in Wave, hadn’t he? When he’d been trying to prove to Haku that people weren’t tools and you couldn’t discard them - I’d been too busy to pay it much mind at the time, but… That came from years of neglect. One conversation and discovering a nindo didn’t change it.

Not that it should be changed. Konoha’s treatment of its jinchuuriki was stupid even _before_ you considered that Naruto of all people deserved so much more. If anything, Naruto should _more_ pissed off, not less, and if he was struggling then I was happy to be angry for him.

“It pays _how much?_ ” Sakura squeaked, interrupting my thoughts. She took the packet the woman on the missions desk was offering her with numb, almost shaking hands.

“A-rank, four man team, month duration…” The kunoichi grinned, clearly amused by Sakura’s reaction. “Yup, that’s the amount. I mean, if you don’t _want_ it then there’re these nunchaku I’ve been eying up, we could make a deal?”

“Thank you for the offer,” Sakura answered on autopilot politeness, cradling the mission pay against her chest. “We, um. Need to go and rescue a cat. From. It’s stuck in a tree. Sorry.”

She bowed and started quick-marching away, and I heard the kunoichi bark out a laugh behind us. “Hatake, your weirdness is contagious!” she yelled after us.

“I’m so proud of my adorable little monkeys,” Kakashi said, pretending to wipe a tear from the corner of his eye. “All grown up. So cute.” He held the pose for a second to draw out the moment while Naruto pulled a face at him, then clapped his hands together to catch our attention. “Downtime tomorrow. No training, no missions. Sasuke, get a jacket so you don’t have to steal Naruto’s. Everyone else, replenish supplies, take a nap, whatever takes your fancy. Normal start time the day after that, don’t be late!”

He gave us a jaunty wave and poofed out in a cloud of bunshin smoke. I wondered idly when he’d switched; was it rude to send a clone to talk to the Hokage instead of appearing in person? Wait. If that had been a clone, what had the original Kakashi been doing? He didn’t spam clones needlessly like Naruto did.

“Hey, Naruto. What did your porn book clone overhear?”

He scratched the back of his head sheepishly. “It hasn’t dispelled yet, sorry. It usually takes a few days.”

Well, that was an annoyance. “Can’t you dispel them on purpose?”

“If they’re people shaped I can, but the henged ones are trickier. I think so? I haven’t worked out how though.”

Was it lazy to want the combination of the unending clone army and the god-modded henge to fix all my problems? Probably. Wasn’t going to stop me doing it though.

We paused outside the tower, waiting for Sakura to pick a direction. She stood in the doorway and stared unseeingly at the village before us.

I shifted my pack on my shoulders.

“Um,” Naruto said eventually, sharing an unsure look with me. “Sakura-chan?”

“We got paid,” she whispered.

“Yes? We did a mission. Even if half of it was just training.”

She shook her head. “We got _paid,_ ” she repeated, clearly not satisfied that we’d understood.

I rolled my eyes, and turned her in the vague direction of where I thought she lived. “Home,” I instructed, giving her a push. “Showers make everything better. You can deal with the money later.”

“At Ichiraku’s!” Naruto called after her as she shambled unsteadily away from us. “At seven. It’s our team thing, believe it!”

“Paid,” she mumbled in what I guessed to be agreement. I watched just enough to check she wasn’t aimed at a wall, then took my own advice and started home. For a shower.

With _no one else waiting for the hot water._

I didn’t sleep that night. Ichiraku’s was comfortably relaxed in a way it felt like we hadn’t been in a long time, and listening to Naruto retell the highlights of the mission was… nice. Cathartic, almost. Sakura’s mission report had been dry and stark as any formal report would be, and though I didn’t have anyone to tell the story to, the version that ran through my head focussed heavily on all the parts I’d screwed up and how I could have handled things better.

Naruto’s version of events though sounded like an adventure. We defeated the demon brothers, discovered there was a greater evil afoot than merely bandits on the road, and swore unflinchingly to help good triumph over it. We faced down an enemy much stronger than ourselves by using our teamwork and wiley cunning, and we learnt powerful techniques to be even stronger when it came to the rematch. We discovered that our so-called enemies were being manipulated into fighting against us and saved them from Gato’s betrayal, and in turn they rose up against their master and freed the village from his iron grip. People celebrated. We left waves as heroes. There were dogs. It was really cool.

And yeah, maybe it was. In a heavily edited retelling with Teuchi and Ayame gasping and cheering at appropriate points, it _was_ really cool. I shouldn’t let go of the things I did wrong or the many ways I needed to improve, but maybe… I didn’t have to forget the other stuff?

Heavy thoughts when you’re full of ramen and it’s finally late enough in spring that the evenings are warm again, but like I said, cathartic. Sakura’s hair was loose in her old style, I was in my yukata (I’d spent a month in only work clothes or pyjamas, the yukata by itself was enough of a luxury to make the world a better place) and Naruto was five bowls down and still going strong, making sure that Teuchi knew that Wave’s cuisine was primarily rice and fish centric and that they were in desperate need of someone importing some noodles and showing them how to make real food.

Walking home after, I was relaxed. My share of the mission pay was in an envelope in my pocket, I was idly working out how many shuriken it would buy me (a lot - A-ranks paid well), and Plushie-tan was waiting on my rolled up futon when I pushed open the kitchen door.

“Hey,” I greeted him, taking him off the futon to lay it out and putting him down with his face turned to the wall. “Pyjama time. Did you know Naruto calls them jimjams?” I shrugged out of my yukata and threw my balled up socks vaguely near the washing pile. “ _Jimjams_ , Plushie-tan. He has these proper old fashioned button-up pyjamas and a walrus sleeping cap. Does he even know what a walrus is? Maybe it’s not a walrus. Maybe it’s a really weird frog.” The neatly folded stack of clothes I was looking through contained, shockingly, only my normal outfits and I pushed them aside with a dissatisfied sound. “Why are all my clothes black,” I pouted. “I’m in a good mood. I want good mood pyjamas. Maybe I’ll spend my mission pay on pink things with blue ribbons, see what Itachi says to that.”

I paused. I’d said it as a joke, but…

Why were my pyjamas black? There were about the only things I had that weren’t Itachi’s castoffs. I’d bought them, new, and chosen them to be black because everything I wore was black. Because Itachi wore black.

I pulled out a random pair of soft pants and a loose sleeveless top and tugged them on, vaguely unsettled by the logic but not quite sure where I’d gone wrong. Or if I’d gone wrong. “You can look now,” I told Plushie-tan on autopilot, turning him back around and shifting him down to my pillow. “Naruto’s jimjams are blue. Really pale blue. You’d think they’d be orange but they’re not.”

I wasn’t sure why I felt the need to share that, but talking to Plushie-tan had always helped me work things out before. Not that there was anything to work out. They were just pyjamas.

I said goodnight, lay in bed with the cover pulled over me and the light off, and I didn’t sleep that night.

It was still bothering me the next day. We had a day off, no missions, no training, and I didn’t have any civilian clothes. The yukata felt like too much of an evening thing, I didn’t want to wear it during the day. That left me with black. And grey, for the shirt, but everything else - including my socks, the fabric of my headband, my sandals - all black. All Itachi’s. Except the socks and the headband.

“Stop being so pathetic,” I told myself, turning the tap to cold and washing my face more vigorously than it needed. “They’re just _clothes_. Itachi’s things are practical, it doesn’t mean anything. If you want other colours get other colours. No one cares.”

I didn’t care. Nor did Plushie-tan, who gave his usual taciturn approval when I asked him. “In fact,” I told him around a mouthful of apple, “You know how much I don’t care? I’m going to clear out the other rooms. It’s stupid to only live in the kitchen. If Naruto and Sakura get to sleep on real beds then I should get to sleep on a real bed, screw the futon.”

I had a couple of hours before we were meant to meet at the weapon shop, and unless Naruto had any plans, the whole of the afternoon free as well. Sakura wanted to do some things with her family after being away for a month, and as apologetic as she’d been neither of us had begrudged her the time. I had some work to do in the garden - I was aiming for rustically unpruned, yes, but it was rocking a bit too much of an overgrown wilds theme at the moment and I was looking forward to sorting it out. Other than that, I needed to restock the kitchen (I’d only picked up a couple of basic things on my way home yesterday), top up supplies, and get the jacket Kakashi had instructed me to. Probably have team lunch somewhere. _Plenty_ of time to clear out the house, and, because I deserved it, I could even splash out on a shiny new outfit and get rid of the damn black.

It was a faultless plan. I nodded to myself decisively and approached the main part of the house with a positive mindset. Productive, forward looking, good for the soul; I’d matured and developed as a character, and the barrier of the house was nothing to the new and improved me.

I slid the door open. Optimism radiated off me in palpable waves. It was going to be easy. I literally couldn’t fuck this up. I couldn’t - all I had to do was lift my foot and take one step into the room.

I allowed myself a moment of hesitation, then grit my teeth and shook myself out of it. I didn’t even have to flick the light on. It was day, I could see the sunlight glinting off the dust motes. My fingers dug into my thigh and the shoji screen doors cast patterned shadows on the empty floor where the tatami mats used to be and apparently I was a piece of fucking _garbage_ because I couldn’t take - it was one _pissing step_ \- I wasn’t seven years old, I’d never _been_ seven years old in this world and if canon-Sasuke could live in his house then _fucking so could I_ -

I leaned back against the kitchen wall and gasped for breath, holding my chest as though I’d been drowning again.

“Fuckdamnit,” I swore. “Stupid. _Stupid._ Fuck.”

See, Kakashi. I was under _zero_ illusions about my invincibility. I might be a piece of shit but at least my eyes were wide open. I didn’t even need the sharingan to see the truth. Which was lucky, because I didn’t have it. Add it to the tally. Ten more things Uchiha Sasuke’s imposter fucked up for him: number eight will shock you.

“Oh my god, shut up,” I hissed. “Get over it. If you can’t get over it, move past it. Go feed the fish or something. Clean out the fountain. _Something._ ”

I gave myself another minute, waiting for my heart to stop racing and my breathing to even out. The fish food lived in a jar on the windowsill, and though I’d rigged a mechanism out of wire and timer-seals to feed the koi while I was gone it had probably run out by now. Not that I liked the fish. I didn’t. Starving them seemed a bit harsh though when they didn’t ask for anything else from me.

“Maybe you should,” I told them, scowling as they crowded up to the surface in search of pellets. “You don’t do anything. You just sit here all day in this stupid pond trusting me to keep you alive, how the fuck are you meant to cope if you won’t look after yourself?”

They didn’t answer. Just flashed their fins at the surface and mouthed hopefully for more. If I’d actually gone ahead and died, would anyone have taken over feeding them? Most were inherited with my parents’ pond, but three I’d found in one of the abandoned gardens and carried here in a bucket.

“Maybe you should,” I repeated, quieter. There were a lot of abandoned gardens in the Uchiha district. Maybe more abandoned fish once, though probably not any more.

“Tazuna had these rock stacks in his pond in Wave,” I continued, trying to shift my focus. “I could build you a rock garden. Maybe we could move house and your new pond can have a massive rock waterfall in it. With littler waterfalls on top. And… a honeysuckle. All spilling over with flowers and smelling nice.”

It wasn’t going to happen, I knew. I was Uchiha - the Uchiha district was my home. It’d always been my home. Abandoned gardens and all. I just… needed to sort some things out, that was all.

“I like honeysuckles,” I said, still in the same quiet tone.

Gardens weren’t meant to be colourful, not like they were back in my old life. Here, they were meant to be beautiful, a calm oasis recreating the untamable harmony of nature. I had… what, three flowering plants? And the red maple tree. Old, established, inherited, carefully placed to be quiet and peaceful and delicately highlight the overwhelming green.

I chewed my lip, considering the fish. “It’s my garden,” I told them, hesitantly. I’d never been scared of the garden the way I’d been scared of the house.

They swam in drifting patterns, mouthing at the fingers I trailed in the water. I’d never paid them much attention before - fish, pond, _wet_ \- but… they were pretty. Bright. No pink, but a lot of orange, thrown in messy splotches over patches of white and red.

“I know,” I said, pushing at the water with my chakra to make tiny waves. I wasn’t sure what I was agreeing to, but I’d missed talking to things and the fish made good listeners. “Look, I have another hand. All the fingers. Do you want to see a trick? Here, watch.”

I spent the next hour flattening my chakra into a scoop and picking up handfuls of water with it, dribbling them back down over the surface of the pond like a patchy, mediative rain. It wasn’t useful, but it helped, even when the fish learnt the water was just water and stopped trying to chase the ripples.

I was still quiet when I left them and finally made it to the weapon’s shop. Not a sad quiet. A quiet quiet. The world was big, I’d seen a lot of it, I wanted to buy an unreasonable quantity of shuriken and make approving noises when Sakura asked if the reinforced elbow-length gloves she’d picked out looked good on her.

“You ok?” she asked when we stopped for lunch, bentos spread out on the grass as we sat under a tree. “You seem down.”

“I’m fine,” I said, pressing the riceball I’d been absentmindedly tearing apart back together again. “Just didn’t sleep well, that’s all.”

“Me neither,” Naruto complained. “It doesn’t feel right without someone on watch.”

Sakura nodded. “The room feels too big,” she said. “I think I got used to sharing.”

“We should do it again!” Both Sakura and I looked at Naruto askance, but he grinned and leaned forward. “I mean, sleepovers, right? Who says it’s only for missions? It’ll be fun!”

“I’m not doing night watch again,” I said. On missions, fine. At home, piss off.

“ _Sleepover_ , bastard, not stakeout.”

“I don’t know, I’m not sure my parents would approve,” Sakura said. She made a face. “I don’t think they were expecting me to be gone so long, it was a bit of a shock for them. Plus, you’re both boys, so. They’d find it odd.”

Naruto scrunched his nose, not sure how he was allowed to respond to that. It clearly wasn’t odd to Sakura - she _had_ been sharing a room with us for the past month - but at the same time, they were parents. I think he put family on the same kind of mythical pedestal as he put the Hokage on.

Which reminded me, I’d told him I’d find him the team photo of my mum and his mum. Or, well, my mum and Kushina, I don’t think I’d ever actually said she was his mum. It’d been just before we went to Wave though, I’d completely forgotten to look.

“Oh,” Naruto settled for saying. “The bastard and I can have a sleepover though, right bastard?”

“Do you want to help me look for the photo?” I asked instead of responding. I blinked, then reran his question through my head. “Sleepover. Sorry. I’m not paying attention today.”

“What photo?”

“My mum’s team photo, of her and Uzumaki.” Was I meant to know her name? I knew Naruto wasn’t meant to know of her yet, but I also knew he was desperate for family. It wouldn’t be unreasonable for me to know my mum’s genin team. “Um, I think she was called Kushina.”

Naruto squinted at me for a second, trying to place the reference, and I could practically see the moment the memory clicked. “Yeah,” he said, smiling at me. There was something off in the smile but it morphed quickly into his usual excitement and I wasn’t able to pin it down. “Yeah! And you can introduce me to your family as well, it’ll be great, believe it!”

“I can’t believe I’m missing the chance to see where you live, Sasuke-kun,” Sakura said. I froze with another riceball halfway to my mouth. What. I hadn’t. Shit. This was not well thought through. “We’ll have to go round to yours again later. You live in the Uchiha district, right? I always thought they’d have really beautiful houses out there.”

I stuffed my mouth full of rice to avoid answering. With how out of it I was I’d probably end up asking them to move in or something equally ridiculous. Shit. My tiny kitchen home was fine, but that didn’t mean I wanted people to see it. I didn’t even have a family shrine, if Naruto was expecting a painting and an incense burner so he could say hello - hell, I couldn’t even think when the last time I’d visited their graves was. If I ever had. But Naruto was so happy, I couldn’t take the offer _back,_ could I? So sorry, forgot I was a shambolic mess pretending to be a person, would rather keep the mystery alive for a while longer so bugger yourself off please and thank you kindly?

Shit.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Apologies for the minor delay. I thought I'd use the break between arcs to write a quick oneshot for mermay and it ended up being 18000 words long. We're back to every other day though after this :)
> 
> Couple of quick notes! Firstly, a discord server has been requested. I know very little about discord, but is this something people are interested in? Second: Sasuke's gender. The short answer is that Sasuke is _she_ but still working that out; accepting her gender is part of accepting herself and is not something she can rush. Please feel free to use them if you prefer. The long answer, if you're interested, is [down in this comment](https://archiveofourown.org/comments/304589371) to avoid filling up this author's note/putting potential spoilers where people might read them if they don't want to. (No actual spoilers, just character development discussion).
> 
> That's it, thank you all for continuing to be amazing, roll on the rest of the fic!


	15. Chapter 15

Sakura left after lunch, so it was just Naruto and I heading to the clothes shop. He needed a couple more undershirts, apparently - because _some_ people grew, imagine that, just randomly gaining extra inches of height and they didn’t even have to do anything to get them, _where_ please were my gangly Uchiha genes and why weren’t they working - and I needed a jacket. My enthusiasm for a dramatic outfit changing montage had been somewhat nuked by failing to clean the house out this morning, but I did try.

Mostly.

The jacket I got was blue instead of black. Blue-grey. Dark blue-grey. It counted. It was also from the kunoichi section, I think; I’d angled to the clothes that looked best for flexibility rather than providing armour protection, though the leather-like material and obligatory high collar should at least deflect a glancing blow.

I grabbed a random packet of brighter blue tops on the way to the counter. Most shinobi wore the same outfit all the time; bulk buying made sense. No, I didn’t want to try them on. Naruto was waiting. That was the only reason. I wasn’t going to lose my nerve and decide to stay in Itachi’s hand-me-downs for the rest of eternity if I had to go to the changing room, don’t be ridiculous.

Me and my wardrobe were fine.

“Uzumaki-kun,” the guy behind the counter greeted with a nod, pushing himself off his stool. “Did you want the bargain bin? There’s a spandex set marked down. Apparently it’s the wrong shade of green.”

Well at least me and my wardrobe were better than _that._ Also, what, the right gear could literally save Naruto’s life - and he was only allowed to shop from the bargain bin? Was that why he ended up in orange? I didn’t have my weapon pouch on me but I had a whole shopping bag of shiny new shuriken, these paper-wrapped purchases and I were ready to _throw hands_ -

“Oh my god, _stop,_ ” Naruto hissed, elbowing me hard enough in the ribs to make me take a step back. “Not today, Suisei-san!” he said brightly to the cashier. “We just got back from a big mission, I’m shopping full price.” He deposited his set of white shirts on the counter and grinned, hands hanging loose by his side and entire posture relaxed.

I squinted at him suspiciously. Then at Suisei. He looked a few years older than us, not as old as Kakashi, and his polite expression was a sharp contrast to the wild tangle of his hair. He’d also made the bold fashion choice of matching his purple haori to his purple nail polish and adding a bright red trim round the hem just for the hell of it. He didn’t look like a dickbag. Maybe. He rang up Naruto’s shirts with the edge of a smile threatening to break his polite facade and didn’t seem to overcharge him, so. _Maybe_. I would reserve judgement.

“That’s an intense look,” he said when he turned to me. He ran a hand through his hair, flattening it self consciously, and raised an eyebrow at me. “Do I have something on my face?”

I looked away to avoid answering, suddenly realising how rude I was being. Not that I really cared, but if this guy was friendly to Naruto I should probably not be quite so hostile to him. I deposited the jacket and tops on his desk instead and waited for him to tell me how much.

“So,” he said once he’d done so, apparently deciding to maintain polite friendliness despite my reticence. “You’re Naruto’s teammate? I don’t think I’ve seen you in here before.”

I nodded warily and counted out ryo faster. This was rapidly turning awkward, and Naruto was by the door and therefore not around to save me. I didn’t small talk. It wasn’t a ninja skill. The academy didn’t teach it, I couldn’t do it, oh thank _fuck_ there’s the bag thank you kindly _give_.

“Lucky Naruto,” Suisei said, handing me the bag and _definitely_ too much change with a smile and what I swear was a wink. “Enjoy your purchases, Shinobi-chan.”

I froze, deer-in-headlights style, then squeaked out an embarrassed, “You too, Shop-san,” flushed bright red in mortification and fled. And, proving that I was _completely justified_ in wanting to fight him earlier, Suisei failed to suppress his laugh-cough as I did so.

“Hey bastard - hey, wait!”

“Walk faster,” I hissed at Naruto. “We need to get food and go home.”

“Yeah, but why do we need to hurry? Why are you blushing? Bastard slow down damnit - what happened?”

We were drawing attention. I slowed to a walk and tugged my collar higher around my neck, hoping it would hide how red my ears were. “I think the guy in the shop was flirting with me.”

Naruto missed a step. “He was _what?_ ”

Nope. No collar is going to hide these ears. Time to hunch shoulders instead. “He winked at me. And called me chan.” He was probably just being friendly. Right? Like you’d joke with a little kid that they’re a heartbreaker. And the change was... a mistake. Yeah. Numbers are hard.

Naruto’s sharp tug on my bangs pulled my attention back to him. “I told you you looked like a girl,” he huffed. “When did you last cut your hair? It’s all long. And girly.”

“It’s not long!” I pushed him off. “Why does -” Oh. _Oh._ He’d called me Shinobi-chan but I wasn’t a girl. Or a little kid. I hadn’t even _realised_ that. Boy body. Remember the boy body. Flat chest. Penis. Obligatory ugh. “And even if it was long, that wouldn’t have to make it girly.”

“It would on you, bastard. Even when it’s short you make it go girly-short.” He poked at the fluff at the back of my head for emphasis and I ducked away, batting his hand out the air.

“My hair’s fine. Stop messing with it or I’m getting tofu for dinner.”

“Why would you put tofu in ramen though? I mean you could, but why?”

“Who said we were having ramen? I want curry.”

“But bastard -”

“My house, my dinner. Curry.”

“You’re the only person who lives here?” Naruto asked, craning his neck to look round the Uchiha district. “But it’s huge. It’s like a whole other part of the village.”

“It was,” I said uncomfortably. “Konoha was built on Uchiha lands. Hashirama grew the trees and marked out the rest of Konoha for the other clans to claim parts of, but this was the old land that we lived in before the treaty.” At least, that’s what clan history said. The history we’d been taught in the academy glossed over most of the Uchiha’s involvement in favour of the Hokages - and, through them, the Senju. I was fairly certain both versions were at least partly suspect, but it was true that the Uchiha district was built in a different style to the rest of Konoha.

Older. Stuffier. Resistant to change. The fire that burns on the last day is as bright and as hot as the fire that burnt on the first, and all that.

“Huh. I didn’t know that. Is that why no one’s allowed in?”

“I - no, it’s because it’s clan land. The Hyuuga and the Nara and all the other clans are just as protective of their parts.”

Thankfully, Naruto didn’t point out how inefficient it was to keep upwards of two hundred houses empty and unused when there were space issues in the rest of the village. Not many space issues, because Konoha made a lot of use of apartment blocks, but the traditional houses and particularly the large gardens that I was used to were rare outside clan lands.

… Maybe I should have looked into it more. As a genin I was technically an adult and therefore technically a full clan head. Politics had already killed the clan once, it would be stupid to let it happen again because I didn’t file my taxes or something equally banal.

“Over the fence,” I instructed, reaching the side of my house. I kept looking forward. I didn’t want to see Naruto’s reaction to the fact that I’d never put in a gate. It was fine.

Shit, I hadn’t got round to cleaning the sozu fountain. It had algae growing up the sides. Why had I spent so long staring at the fish this morning.

“Here. There’s, um, sorry I don’t have slippers - I can lend you socks? Or, um, whatever you prefer.”

“Socks is fine,” he said, kicking his sandals off and leaving them surprisingly neatly by the door. He was fidgeting, looking around while trying not to look like he was looking around and clearly not sure what he was meant to do - I doubted he’d been round to many people’s houses. I’d never had someone round to mine. I mean no, people had been around before the massacre, but I hadn’t been hosting, and obviously I’d had people round in my old life but there were different social rules and I wasn’t sure they applied?

Fuckit. I didn’t know. Naruto didn’t know. My instincts said to make tea. I put the kettle on.

“Socks,” I said, throwing him a clean pair. “Do you want tea tea or barley tea? I have orange juice.”

“Just normal tea. Uh, tea tea. Please.”

I frowned, and considered throwing another pair of socks at him. “Stop being so polite. It’s rude.”

He huffed at me, but some of the tenseness left his shoulders. “Sakura-chan did all this bowing stuff when we met Tsunami-san. She made it seem like a big thing.”

“Yeah, well, Tsunami was a client. If you bow to me I’ll assume you’ve been replaced by an imposter and give you to ANBU for interrogation.”

He cracked a smile at that that quickly morphed into a teasing grin, though I think he must still have been feeling off-kilter because it didn't sit quite right. “But hime-chan,” he started, and dipped himself into not only a ridiculously low bow but also completely the wrong type. Naturally, I scowled at him and used his lack of balance to dump him on the floor. The chokehold I pinned him in was maybe more wrestling than taijutsu but still effective, at least until he popped out in a cloud of bunshin smoke.

“Don’t use clones in my kitchen, dumbass!” I flared out my kawarimi sense to find him. Nothing around me, unless he’d henged - oh. Up. “Get off my ceiling. And drink your tea. And stop _grinning._ ”

“I thought it was rude to be polite,” he said, but he did at least drop to an obedient crouch in front of me and take his tea. I stuck my tongue out at him. Maturely. Because adult. He was being weird, he deserved it.

“Tea. Photo. Find.”

“Yeah yeah. Where would your mum have kept it?” He downed the tea in one like a heathen then looked round the kitchen as though expecting the photo to be on one of the walls, and my stomach sank.

“Her room, probably. It’s down the hall.” I swallowed. I hadn’t - the bathroom was just to the side of the kitchen. The one I used, at least. Itachi’s bedroom had a window that I’d learnt early on how to open from the outside. My old room did too, though other than fetching my stuff when I’d first moved to the kitchen I hadn’t been in. To get to either from the inside, or to get to my parent’s room, you had to go past the main room.

I’d never made it past the main room.

“This one?” Naruto asked, pushing open the kitchen door. It wasn’t late, there was still some sun coming in, but it wasn’t the brightest. He flicked on the light, hesitated at the clearly neglected status of the rest of the house, then started walking forward.

“Yeah,” I managed around a dry mouth. I followed him up to the doorway, hovering there with my toes just on the edge of where the flooring changed. I looked at the back of his head. Just at the back of his head. I took the step. I didn’t look to the right.

“Your house is huge! How come you don’t use the - bastard?”

He turned to face me and I flicked my gaze down so I was looking at the collar of his jacket instead of staring him straight in the eyes. I still didn’t look right. “It’s a bit dusty,” I apologised. “Sorry. Their room is at the end of the hall.”

“Hey, are you -”

Annoyance flared, at him, at me, at Itachi; I grit my teeth and pushed past him. I was right - it _was_ dusty. My feet left footprints. I could practically see it collecting on my socks from where I was disturbing it. “C’mon,” I said. “Did you want to find this damn thing or -” I made the mistake of looking back at him and the words died in my throat.

He was standing in front of the tatami mats. The space where the tatami mats used to be. He was - that’s where I’d been standing. Itachi stabbed me, before I became me, when I was still just old-me and Sasuke-me was a separate person and Naruto was standing where I’d been standing and the tatami mats were behind him except they weren’t because they’d been ruined by so much blood and I couldn’t do this.

I couldn’t do this.

“-tard!”

“I can’t do this,” I choked out, staring fixedly at the tatami mats. The _space_ where - “Aniki, I can’t do this.” I could see every piece of dust on the floor. The grain of the wood. The marks where it had been scrubbed clean but not polished after, the outline of the patches that were darker, they hadn’t done a good enough job scrubbing it clean because I could _see_ it.

“Look at me,” Itachi said. I slammed my eyes shut, instinct driving me to avoid his mangekyou, but everything was still playing out behind my eyelids. “Look at me, damnit.”

He was going to tell me I wasn’t worth killing. I knew I wasn’t. I didn’t want to hear it again. I shook my head. _When you have the same eyes as I do..._

“Sasuke!” He grabbed me, hands on my shoulders and my eyes flew open with a gasp even as I hunched protectively over my chest as if that would stop him from stabbing me -

He was blond. He was blond? Itachi wasn’t blond. His eyes were blue. He had whisker scars. I blinked, and the hyperfocus faded enough for the features to resolve themselves into a person. He was Naruto. He was _Naruto._

“I’m fine,” I said roughly, trying to push him off and take a step back. His grip on my shoulders only tightened, and his face was pinched and unhappy.

“You’re not,” he disagreed, and my temper flared.

“Did I ask for a fucking critique -”

“My clone dispelled,” he interrupted, and it was such a non sequitur that I stopped in confusion.

“Your… what clone? In the kitchen?”

“The one I had on Kakashi-sensei. Porn-book clone.”

“O...kay?” He shifted his weight back to be less in my face, but not far - my fingers were still tangled in the front of his jacket from where I’d tried to shove him off and his hands were still on my shoulders. It was grounding; Itachi had been behind me when I’d been old-me, and he hadn’t touched me as Sasuke-me. Naruto wasn’t Itachi. The subject change was odd, but just right then I was willing to roll with odd. “Did it find out where Kakashi was while we were at the hospital?”

“Yeah,” he said, watching me cautiously. I could see him trying to work out how to word it before he growled in frustration and just said it. “He was at the hospital too, except he was asking about you. What happened when your clan died.”

“What.” _What._ No. My heart had literally just started to calm down, and now it was racing again. He didn’t know. He couldn’t know. Who would - _no._

“He wanted to know if you’d had anyone to help you, or if you’d been alone.” Itachi, was he trying to see if Itachi had been in contact or not, did he think past-me was someone outside Konoha trying to influence Sasuke-me? How, how could he _know._ “He was really mad when he found out you were alone.”

Naruto was still watching, cautious, something in his expression that I couldn’t place. I took a breath and tried to be rational; Kakashi didn’t know Itachi was innocent. He couldn’t. And he didn’t know about past-me. If he did, he’d’ve done something, surely. Besides, how could he? I’d been careful. Itachi had been careful. He was just following up the drowning problems, right? Or the thing about chunin relying on themselves too young. That’s all he was doing. It was fine. I took another breath and held onto my calm like a lifeline.

“Yeah, well,” I said, shrugging it off with an exaggeratedly blase attitude. “It happened.”

“And then after,” Naruto continued doggedly, “He took the porn out, told it that Pakkun was right and puppies go wonky if they’re allowed to get too far from the pack, and dispelled my clone.”

Ok? It had been a very long day. I’d had two panic attacks and used up all my zen communing with the fish. I did not have the mental or spiritual energy left for decrypting Kakashi speech. “That’s all he said?”

“Well, and that if he caught me spying again he’d set Bisuke on me.” He shook his head and shifted imperceptibly to inspirational pose number one, with shoulders squared and eyes bright with determination.

I stiffened on reflex.

“He’s right though, Sasuke. You shouldn’t have been alone. And you shouldn’t be alone now.”

“I’m not a child,” I hissed, bristling defensively.

His eyebrows lowered and he lifted his chin. “You’re my precious person,” he said. “And I promised I’d protect you and that means not abandoning you when you need someone.”

“Because you’d know all about being abandoned, right?” I felt like a dick as soon as I said it, but the guilt only made me angrier and I pushed roughly past him to hide in the safety of the kitchen. “And I don’t need anyone! I’m fine!”

“You can’t even go in your own house -”

“ _My_ house,” I repeated, whirling on him. “My house, my brother, my life. So piss off out of it and leave me alone.” He’d followed me through the door but I could still see the fucking space behind him where Itachi had ruined everything because he had to go and be such a _damn hero_ instead of being there when I needed him. I glared and flung a spike of water chakra at the door, slamming it shut and no doubt sending a cloud of dust flying up in the corridor. Good. I hoped it broke something.

Naruto jumped when the door slammed, but turned back to me quickly and now his stupid hero face had started to twist up in frustration. “ _No,_ ” he snarled. “Damnit bastard, I’m not going anywhere! I’m trying to help!”

“Do I look like I fucking _want_ your help?”

“Why _not_?” He ran a hand through his hair in a jerky movement, and the frustration bled away as suddenly as it’d come. “Why not, though?” he repeated, shoulders slumping, and I paused at the hurt in his tone. “You’re my friend,” he continued in a quieter voice. “What’s wrong with me helping you? It’s what friends do.”

I… didn’t answer. I felt brittle and sharp, and there were too many things I couldn’t say. He thought I was someone I wasn’t. I was an imposter. It was fine for canon-Sasuke to have been fucked up by what Itachi did, but I knew better. I knew he loved me. I was an adult, even if I didn’t feel like one. I didn’t want help because I didn’t want to need help because I _shouldn’t_ need help.

But I did. And I hated it. And apparently I’d learnt nothing from the stupid _everything_ that happened at Wave, because here I was, scared, lashing out at someone who cared as though I were expecting them to stick a sword through my chest if I let them get any closer.

Dumbass. Naruto wasn’t an Uchiha. We were the fuckups that ruined people we loved, not Naruto.

“I’m sorry,” I said, arms crossed protectively and shoulders hunched forward. I kept my eyes closed, head tilted down, and didn’t look at him. I heard him take a step forward though, and had to tense every muscle I had to avoid flinching. That would hurt him. I’d already done that enough for one day.

“I’m not Sakura,” he said, still keeping his voice low. “I don’t know how to do things like this. I just… I used to be really jealous of you, you know? You had all these people fawning over you and the teachers loved you and you were good at everything and I thought you lived in this amazing place. I’d’ve given anything to have half of what you had, but you were just annoyed all the time.”

“I’m not always grumpy,” I protested weakly.

“You were in the academy. But I get it now. Everyone saw you as the last Uchiha, this amazing prodigy child, but no one saw _Sasuke._ You were alone.” He took another step and I stayed frozen in place. “I know what that’s like. It sucks. It really, really sucks and it messes with your head and it’s awful, but you’re not alone now. I promise, bastard. I’m not going to abandon you, because you’re my friend, and I don’t give up on my precious people.”

I snorted at that. No, he didn’t, did he. I could betray the village and put my fist through his lungs and he’d still come after me. Damn heroes. What the hell were we normal fuck-ups meant to do in the face of a declaration like that?

He took the last step, standing close enough that I could feel his body heat radiating off him. “Sasuke-bastard?”

I let myself lean forward until my forehead was resting against his chest. “Who gave you the right,” I mumbled into his jacket. “If you grew up lonely like me then how come you turned out such a good person, huh. You cheated. Bitch.”

He laughed, shaky and relieved, and his arms came up round me in a tentative hug that squeezed tighter when I didn’t shrug him off. “Blame Iruka-sensei,” he said. “He bribed me with ramen.”

I hadn’t bought any mochi, but I had got a tub of ice cream, and though we didn’t look for the photo that evening we did follow up the tofu curry I’d made for dinner with a truly unreasonable quantity of matcha sundae. At some point we started planning the flavours we’d sell when Naruto became Hokage and I opened a mochi and ice cream shop at the bottom of his tower, and while his suggestions were ridiculous - a _naruto_ flavour, who wanted _fish cake_ ice cream even if the swirl would be pretty - mine were heavily nostalgic and almost impossible to describe.

“Fish food is worse than fish cakes! That’s not even real food, bastard.”

“No, it’s just _called_ fish food. It’s actually chocolate, with, um, you cook butter with sugar until it goes brown and hard. And you cut it into fish shapes. I think? Or maybe the fish were made out of cake? It’s good though.”

“Tonkatsu ice cream. _That_ would be good.”

“I am never ever letting you cook.”

And after that… it was late. This whole thing had started with Naruto saying he wanted a sleepover. I was exhausted and full and, if I was honest, didn’t want him to go.

I also didn’t want him taking up three quarters of my futon, but I didn’t have a spare.

“Would you stop _wriggling._ ”

“I’m not wriggling! I’m just trying to get under the blanket.”

“Uchiha are fire. We need warmth. You’re a fucking furnace and you don’t feel the cold. My blanket.”

“Just - I’m not going to take it all bastard, I just want a corner.”

“ _My blanket._ ”

And, once we’d worked out a compromise, I didn’t want to admit how much easier I slept with him there. Maybe he and Sakura were right - we’d just got used to the way things were in Wave. Maybe I had less going on in my head after dumping it all in an argument and being blasted with a dose of therapy no jutsu. Maybe I just… slept better with Naruto there.

Whatever the reason, I was in a good enough mood to just roll my eyes at Sakura’s raised eyebrow when she noticed us arrive at training together.

“I take it the sleepover went well?” she asked dryly.

“The bastard’s house is too big,” was Naruto’s far too cheerful answer. “Don’t worry though Sakura-chan, we’re working on it.”

“What am I, an untrained house pet?”

“Wonky puppy,” Naruto reminded me, pointing. I bared my teeth and pretended to bite his finger.

“We’re _all_ puppies,” Sakura said firmly. “Stretch. I want to test my gloves, spar after?”

“Spar,” I agreed, flipping over into a handstand. I’d already stretched at home that morning, but, you know. Being flexible was fun.

So was the spar - we’d been so focussed on practices and katas in Wave that, barring the obligatory running for our lives from the pack, we hadn’t actually trained together for a while. The difference was stark - Naruto’s taijutsu had improved to the point where his clones were a serious threat if you let them get close enough, and though I was still indisputably the fastest Sakura now had the speed and stamina to combine her hellish punches in unrelenting combinations that were, objectively, terrifying.

And then she twisted her wrists a fraction to the left and a pair of fucking _chain saws_ popped out her gloves.

“What the actual fucking _fuck_ holy shit what the _hell,_ ” I panted, clinging to the top of the tallest tree I could find to kawarimi to.

“Do you like them?” she yelled up to me, holding her arms out to admire them. “You said they looked good in the shop, but I didn’t think you were paying attention.”

“I thought they were for punching things!”

“Oh, they do that too,” she said, and another precise twist replaced the spinning blades on her forearms with a set of narrow spikes coming out over her knuckles. “Not sure I’ll use those so often, though. They’re a bit thin.”

I dropped cautiously to the ground, reaching for her hand to inspect them. They were thin, but they’d still do some serious damage if she landed a hit with them. “You could poison them,” I suggested. “You could probably poison the others as well. How do they spin?”

“Just chakra - there’s a seal that controls them. I hadn’t thought about poison. Anticoagulant, maybe? I don’t want a lethal one.”

I hummed, thinking. There were plenty of reasons to need to leave someone alive, but bleeding out without clotting was a fairly slow-acting benefit. “Or paralytic? I’m pretty sure I’ve got the right plants.” The spinning arm blades would do a lot of damage, and with the right paralytic so that even a glancing blow could cause someone to stumble - well, _I_ wouldn’t like to be on the receiving end. It wouldn’t necessarily be lethal, but it wouldn’t be easy to shake off either.

“Huh,” Sakura said. She clenched her fist and the spikes retracted, then again to bring out the arm blades. I prudently kawarimid back to a safe distance again, because the spar was technically still going and I wasn’t an idiot.

“Morning minions.”

“Kakashi-sensei! What mission are we doing today? Where are we going? Is it another bridge? Are the dogs coming again?”

“Hm?” Kakashi asked, taking out his book and leafing through it. “You say something?”

“Dick-senseeeeeeeiiiiii,” Naruto whined. “Mission!”

“Maa, I was thinking of doing some training actually. After all, you just came from a long mission! Training’s important too, you know.” He eye-smiled and Naruto and Sakura both slumped.

“We’ve been doing nothing but training,” she complained quietly, though clearly not quietly enough as Kakashi zeroed in on her with terrifying focus.

“What was that, my sweet little munchkin? You can’t possibly have said you’ve been training. After you worked so hard for your month long A-rank! Why, with all the patrolling you did, I’m surprised you found time to sleep.”

We shared a dubious look, but fell in line easily enough. If Kakashi wanted to pretend he hadn’t run the last week of the Wave mission solo and banned us from participating, who were we to disagree with him.

“What are we learning?” Sakura asked. “After all that patrolling over the river we’ve got water walking down, so we must be learning something new, right sensei?”

He raised an eyebrow at her blatant manipulation of the truth, but he seemed amused by it. “Is that so? Maa, I suppose it must be. First though…” He threw us each a sash, covered in tiny strips of coloured paper: orange for Naruto, which made sense, then yellow for Sakura and purple for me, which made less sense, but ok.

“I want to see how you’re getting on,” he explained. “Whoever has the most paper wins!” And, with that very rough set out of the rules, he shunshined off - presumably to a better perch in the trees to watch from.

We paused for a beat, Sakura glancing at both me and Naruto in turn as we all checked that we were on the same page. She wrapped her sash round her waist, Naruto threw his crossways over his shoulder, and though I debated stuffing mine down my shirt I decided to play fair and tied it at my hip instead. It was in the same position, though on the other side, as my weapon pouch and I figured it would be good practice in keeping people away from it.

“Ready?” Sakura asked. I nodded. Naruto did as well, though a beat slower, and he had the same odd look on his face that he’d had yesterday. I frowned at him, but I didn’t have time to ask - or know how to - because Sakura dived at me the next second and I scrambled into a kawarimi to stay out her way.

As far as training exercises went, it was a surprisingly fun one, and well suited to someone fast, sneaky, and able to throw sharp things with pinpoint accuracy. I even caught a few fluttering strips in my chakra and tugged them to safety without ever being in reach, which was a delightful thing to learn I could do. Maybe I’d misjudged water; fire would never have given me the solidity to pick something up with like this. It was still cold though. And wet. Being useful didn’t make it good.

What was not delightful though was the growing suspicion I had that there was something wrong with Naruto. In the spar we’d been doing earlier his taijutsu was miles better than it was before, sharper and cleaner and each strike a decisive threat. Now… it was almost like he was pulling his punches, twitching them aside before they could land and weakening his blocks at the last minute to let me through. My sash was in danger of being more orange than purple.

I hung back, hiding myself in the leaves and squinting to watch him and Sakura fight. He didn’t _seem_ injured, not that I could see, and against her he was landing hits like I’d expect him to. I chanced darting in, throwing a shuriken in an easy arc and ducking low -

The shuriken caught his arm, and he was so slow in dodging me that I almost overcorrected trying not to seriously hurt him. I aborted, leaping back with eyes wide and heart racing. “What the fuck, Naruto?”

Sakura dropped out the tree next to me. “What happened?”

“Ah, nothing!” Naruto said with his cheerful, squinty-eyed fake smile. “The bastard got me. He’s too fast!”

We both paused, staring at him in surprise.

“Did you poison it?” Sakura asked me, gesturing at the shuriken. I shook my head. I didn’t even bring poisons to practice, they weren’t the sort of thing you used on teammates.

“He doesn’t need poison,” Naruto said earnestly. “He’s really good. His taijutsu’s the best, you’d have to be really strong to beat him. _Really_ strong. It’s not a fair comparison if he loses against people like that.”

“Naruto,” I started, half-dropping out of my defensive crouch. I didn’t know how to finish though, so I just trailed off with a confused, “What?”

“He got the most paper, see. He won!”

“Were you _letting_ him win?” Sakura asked. Naruto’s eyes widened and he shook his head frantically, but Sakura made an outraged sound of disbelief. “You were. Why were you letting him win?” She glanced at me for answers, but I shrugged helplessly in reply.

“I _wasn’t_ ,” Naruto began hotly, but when neither of us showed signs of believing him he let his shoulders slump. “Because he’s really good,” he said miserably. “He doesn’t deserve to be sent away just ‘cos he lost against Haku.”

To be - oh.

Oh.

I took an uncertain step back.

“Naruto,” Sakura said, turning so she could keep both of us in view. “That’s not… He’s not going to be sent away.”

“But Kakashi -”

“That’s not the problem,” I blurted. “Losing against Haku’s not the issue.”

“Then what _is?_ Because everything turned out fine, didn’t it? No one got hurt, so I don’t get why everyone was so mad at you.” And he didn’t, clearly, his confusion and distress liberally painted on his face. I opened my mouth, searching for something to say to reassure him, and came up blank. I was still still working through my _own_ messes from the whole thing, how was I meant to sort out someone else?

“Sasuke-kun nearly died,” Sakura told him, gentling her tone but not by much. Naruto scowled, shaking his head, and I privately thought that however I would’ve handled it that _might_ not have been the route I chose.

“It wasn’t his fault -”

“He still would’ve died.” She hesitated in the face of his refusal to accept it, then kept going. “Naruto, we were _lucky._ If Zabuza had been anyone else - if Kakashi-sensei hadn’t been able to stop his jutsu… That wasn’t a spar. Sasuke-kun put himself in danger, and if it had gone even fractionally different, he would’ve been killed.”

He looked at me, angry, waiting for me to protest. I couldn’t, because it was true, but I also couldn’t think of anything to say, so I just shrugged. Again. Awkwardly. Apologetically. I didn’t know what else to do.

“But he was saving Haku,” Naruto said in a small voice. Then, “He’d really have died?”

 _Soft and squishy,_ I thought with a suddenly inappropriate surge of dark humour. _You need to be this indestructible to ride the main character train. Go back to sidekick, shortarse._ I pushed it away, annoyed at myself for being distracted.

Sakura must’ve nodded, because when Naruto turned back to me he just looked heartbrokenly confused. “Why?”

I bit my lip, trying to find an answer. Or enough of an answer to offer him. “Um, Kakashi said I think I’m invincible,” I said. “Because I’ve always been the best and had to look after myself, so I’m reckless.”

“Ah,” Kakashi said, making all three of us startle. He was up in the trees with us, crouched to one side and scratching at the fabric of his mask. “Did he? It’s not what he meant to say.”

“I - what? No, it’s.” I faltered. “With the chunin? They were alone and couldn’t rely on anyone and it made them invincible and over-confident?” That’s what he’d said. Hadn’t he? We’d bonded. Bull was there.

He closed his eye, a fraction too long to be a blink, then half-nodded half-shook his head. “ _Some_ of them thought they were,” he said, stressing the first word. “And others thought they had to be. If failing means you die, then you do anything to avoid failing, even if it's too risky.” He paused, then added, "You're the second one."

I tried to run what I remembered of the conversation back through my head, frowning in confusion.

“But you had all these things I’d survived,” I said. “You listed them. You said I knew I was better than other genin.”

“I did,” he said, an edge of helplessness in his tone. “Because you are. And you do. And. Therefore your standards are too high?”

“My _standards_ are too high?”

“You’re not over confident. You’re under confident." He winced, not happy with his word choice, but kept going. "You’re good, but you think you’re not good enough because you think you have to be invincible. Because… A lot of bad things have happened and you had to deal with them and now you’re afraid?”

I just kept looking at him blankly. Yes? I was? The village wanted my eyes. Of course I was afraid. He didn’t need to make that bit sound like a question, that was obvious. I shot an unsure glance at Sakura and Naruto, but they looked just as confused as me.

“Ah.” Kakashi's shoulders dropped. “I’m not good at this.”

“If the bastard’s afraid,” Naruto began hesitantly, “then me an’ Sakura-chan just have to stick closer to him to keep him safe, right? So he has to stay on the team, otherwise he’d be doing everything by himself again.”

“That’s not -” I started, then stopped myself, trying to sort through why it wasn’t. I had a reason, beyond just my gut instinct that it was wrong. I had lots of reasons, somewhere. “You shouldn’t have to always look out for me, though. I should be able to do things.”

“We don’t,” Sakura said. Naruto frowned, but she cut him off: “We don't have to. We want to. I’m the team leader, I said you stay, so.” She took a breath, and visibly drew herself up to stand taller. “So, you stay. Do things with us, not for us. And Naruto, stop letting him win. Ok?” She darted a glance at Kakashi, as if checking if she was allowed to be so authoritative; he inclined his head to her with an odd half-smile that was barely visible through his mask.

“Ok,” Naruto agreed. Then again, stronger: “Ok! Kakashi-dick-sensei, you best have more sashes. I’m going to get all the paper this time, believe it!”

“Ok, Sasuke-kun?” Sakura insisted.

“Yeah,” I said. Maybe? I wasn’t sure. "Ok."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Kakashi who has had several days to rehearse what he wants to say and run it past Pakkun: eloquent, calm, doesn't get his point across.  
> Kakashi who discovers on the spot that he messed up and desperately wants to fix it: disjointed, confusing, maybe gets his point across? Regret.
> 
> (also, if anyone gets the plot point i hid in this chapter i will scream)
> 
> Discord! People wanted a discord, we have a discord. It's [over here](https://discord.gg/dRx2cva), I'm Mimi, let's go.
> 
> And ficlet! This one for yourkayla who asked [what happened to canon-Sasuke](https://archiveofourown.org/comments/304788961). The answer's not part of this story - consider it an AU of an AU. Actually, consider all the ficlets in the comments AU of an AU, if anything's part of the actual story I'll stick it in the main body ;)


	16. Chapter 16

If Kakashi had had other training planned for the rest of that day, we didn’t get round to it. When the three of us staggered out of the second round of the paper sash exercise (which Naruto won by playing an elaborate game of keep away, using his clones to keep Sakura and I from ever getting close enough to steal from him) it was to find Pakkun and Urushi waiting, a d-rank mission scroll held securely in Urushi’s mouth.

“Puppies,” Pakkun said, trotting up with his tail wagging. Urushi was one of the quieter dogs that I didn’t know so well - though, they’d only been around for a week or so, and Shiba and Bull tended to stick in the mind. For different reasons.

I had the sudden urge to find out if the Uchiha had a giant cat summons who was willing to let people curl up and go to sleep on them. Knowing both the Uchiha clan and the reputation that cat summons had, I thought it was probably unlikely.

“Hey Pakkun,” I said, putting impossibilities out of my mind. He kept trotting until he headbutted my shin, and waited for a few ear-scritches before continuing to Naruto and Sakura for the same greeting. “Where’s Kakashi?”

Pakkun huffed, giving his head a single hard shake. “Not here. He left a mission for you.”

We shared a dubious look. Hadn’t we been meant to train today? A jounin sensei was usually considered off limits, though the village could still call them in if there was a shortage - or if the jounin’s unique skills were needed. Neither were particularly comforting prospects given that we should have plenty of available nin at the moment, and Kakashi’s unique skills were centered on violent assassination.

“May I see?” Sakura asked, holding out a hand to Urushi and politely not mentioning the teeth marks in the scroll.

Unless… Kakashi hadn’t got called away? I chewed my lip. He’d seemed pretty thrown by the conversation earlier. Maybe he’d needed to take a moment.

“He’s at the memorial stone?” I guessed, keeping my voice low so that only Pakkun could hear.

“He’s not here,” Pakkun replied, though from the way he drifted closer I took it to mean I was right. “Focus on the mission, pup.”

I did, for long enough to determine that it was a menial chore and neither Sakura nor Naruto were impressed with it. I frowned unhappily though; Kakashi needing to take a moment was theoretically fine. He was a grown man, he could make his own decisions, but. It didn’t _feel_ fine.

I chewed my lip, falling absently into step with the others. I knew I was hardly in any place to talk about - well, anything. But if I had Team Seven to look out for me while I was in Konoha and Itachi waiting for when I left, who did Kakashi have?

“So I was thinking,” Naruto said later that evening when we’d split up to go to our various homes. “You always have miso ramen, right? But you like fish. So why can’t you just put fish on ramen?”

“Ichiraku doesn’t sell fish ramen,” I pointed out logically.

“No, I mean at home. You could just make a normal one, then do the fish separately and eat them together.”

I made a dubious sound. As quick and easy as instant ramen was, real ramen was a pain to make and I didn’t like it enough to bother. “I have fish with other things,” I said. “Ramen’s more of a Team Seven food than a home food.”

Naruto looked at me in alarm. “But you have it at home sometimes, right?” I shook my head and I swear he whimpered. “Bastard! We can’t _never_ have home ramen. The three minutes it takes to cook aren’t that bad!”

“Hold up. We?”

“I’m not going to make you cook two dinners. That’s mean.”

“No, I mean - why _we?_ Eat whatever you want, it’s your dinner.” He cocked his head, frowning at me, and I realised that we’d broken off from Sakura and the dogs and were now halfway back to the Uchiha district - and Naruto’s house, I was pretty sure, was the other way. “Wait,” I said, slowing to a halt. “Wait, stop. You haven’t moved in with me.”

He frowned harder. “Wonky puppy.”

“Actual adult,” I countered. I even was; genin were full adults as far as Konoha was concerned.

“So? I’m not going to abandon you.”

“Letting me live in my own house isn’t _abandoning_ me,” I said, and made a frustrated sound. “It’s also not babysitting me, which is something I really don’t need you to do.”

“But yesterday -”

“I had a bad day. It was a sleepover. A one night sleepover.”

“What if you have another bad day though?”

I glared, but he wasn’t moving, and the more I pushed the unhappier he seemed. Which wasn’t my intention. I mean, it wasn’t ever my _intention_ to make people around me unhappy, unless I didn’t like them. But Naruto in particular spent far too much time putting other people first, even if it was as stupid as throwing a training excercise because he’d wildly misunderstood a situation.

I paused. “Wait,” I said, squinting. “Did _you_ have a bad day?”

He squinted unhappily back and started walking again. “Sakura-chan said you'd nearly died,” he said plaintively. “Everyone had a bad day.”

I hesitated. My kitchen really wasn’t built for two. Let’s be honest, it wasn’t really built for one. On the other hand, there were occasions in life where it was possible to not be a dick, and this was probably one of them. Plus, it was Naruto. “Fine,” I relented, jogging a few paces to catch up to him. “You can sleep over on bad days.”

He frowned at me suspiciously. “And you promise to tell me when they are?” I rolled my eyes and jostled my arm against his in reproach, but dutifully promised. “Well. Ok then, bastard. I guess I’ll allow it.” He smiled at me, the softer version of his usual grin, and slung an arm over my shoulders as the tension drained out of him. I let him for a moment then ducked my head and slipped out of his hold, resuming a more normal walk down the street.

Having my home basically being invaded still wasn’t ideal. I couldn’t talk to Plushie-tan properly with someone else in the room, and Naruto’s potential as a hot water bottle was severely mitigated by the fact that he fidgeted even more than usual in his sleep. But at the same time, making Naruto feel better was a dangerously addictive pastime, and I could spare a few nights sharing my futon if that’s what it cost.

Giving up first shower, however, was a step too far. We’d ended up doing two d-ranks, neither of which Kakashi had turned up to, and one of them had involved collecting the biological waste from the hospital and taking it to an incinerator to be disposed of. Without subjecting you to the details, I needed a shower. Not necessarily because I’d got any on me - a ninja hospital was still a hospital, it was at least nominally a sterilised place - but more for my soul and mental well being.

“Yours,” I said, stepping back into the kitchen in my yukata and gently patting the moisture out my hair with a towel. “Do you want leftover curry for dinner or omelet rice?” Please don’t laugh at the fact that I still ate kids’ food; there were a limited number of things I knew how to cook, and most of my old-world recipes needed ingredients I couldn’t get.

“Either,” Naruto said, taking his pyjamas into the bathroom. “I’ve never had omelet rice.”

He closed the door before I could answer that, and I blinked. I… guessed that made sense? It wasn’t very common to find in a restaurant or as a packet meal, so he probably wouldn’t have come across it by himself. It was also downright weird though, because it was such a standard thing. There was something inherently _wrong_ about no one ever making it for him. “Omelet,” I decided, abandoning my towel and shaking my hair out to air dry instead.

Pyjamas though. That was an idea. I turned Plushie-tan around to face the wall on my way to the sideboard and started searching through for a clean pair. “They’re still black,” I said, frowning as I pulled one out. Didn’t I fix that? I thought I fixed that. The bags from the shopping trip were leaning against the wall, not yet put away, and I retrieved them curiously.

“White shirts… Oh, these are Naruto’s. This one… Jacket, shuriken - blue shirts.” I pulled out the packet, giving it a dubious look. I’d grabbed it without really looking, but now that I had it in front of me it was really quite blue. Royal blue. Full saturation. Wow.

“What do you reckon, Plushie-tan,” I said, ripping the packet open and tipping out the contents. “Will they suit… me…? This isn’t a shirt.” It was also not several of the same outfit like I’d hoped, just one really bulky thing made of a thick, pleated material. When I shook it out, it resolved itself into a hakama, complete with high tie-waist and loose baggy legs. The block colour in theory marked it as a girl’s hakama - though I think only the stuffier clan members stuck to boys being striped and girls being plain - and, in concession to not getting the kunoichi that wore it killed, it had the bottom hems elasticated in tight around the ankles.

“Great,” I said, holding it up in irritation. “Maybe I can cut it up for something. Add it to the sewing pile.” I wasn’t optimistic though; any ninja could patch a tear or resew a split seam, but tailoring from scratch wasn’t in my skill set. I chewed my lip, deliberating. It seemed stupid to waste it. I should put it aside and focus on dinner, but I could still hear the shower pump. Naruto wouldn’t be out for a few minutes yet.

I hesitated. On the sideboard Plushie-tan was, as ever, silent.

“Fine,” I relented, rolling my eyes at him. “Briefly. _Very_ briefly.”

That turned out to be a false expectation because it took me several tries to work out how to tie it and even then I wasn’t convinced I managed it correctly. I turned sideways, trying to check behind me in the mirror to make sure I’d got the side slits to sit right - and paused.

It looked… impractical. Ridiculous. There was so much material bunching at the hips, and with the hems as low and wide as they were - even elasticated - you couldn’t wear sandals with it. There was so much material _full stop,_ if you tried to kick anyone would you even be able to or would it billow out behind you like a damn sail and drag you back? How was this sold in a ninja shop. Forget that, how was I spending _this long_ on a scene about putting my pyjamas on. What was I going to do next, express my love of Hot Topic and put up my middle finger at a bunch of preps?

Not that the hakama looked like pyjamas. It looked like a skirt. A stupid, brightly coloured, civilian skirt.

The shower pump clicked off and I jumped, hands flying up to cover the chest I forgot I didn’t have. “Idiot,” I hissed when I realised, reaching for the nearest black top and pulling it on in a hurried movement. I ripped the ties undone at my waist with a rough jerk that, if the stitches hadn’t been ninja-reinforced, would have torn them loose, and scrambled to push the whole thing off and replace it with my normal pyjamas. I barely had time to roll the hakama in a haphazard ball and shove it to the back of the sideboard before the door opened and Naruto emerged, dressed but still damp with his hair plastered down against his skull.

Even as distracted as I was, I winced. The boy had no concept of treating himself right; clothes sticking to you as you moved and dripping wet hair did not a happy evening make.

He paused when he caught sight of me, wide-eyed and clutching a shopping bag, and I dropped it and turned to the oven before he could comment. “Omelet rice! Omelet. And rice. Um, the ketchup’s in the cupboard, do you want three eggs? I have more eggs.”

“Three eggs is ok?” he said, more thrown by my rapid statements than anything else.

“I’ll do you four,” I told him, and started pouring rice in the cooker far too enthusiastically. Damnit, my ears were red. I could feel them burning.

Not that I was affected by wearing girl’s clothes. I wasn’t. I didn’t care. If I cared, I wouldn’t have shopped from the kunoichi section in the first place. And they weren’t girl’s clothes anyway, they were just clothes. I’d been surprised to see myself in bright colours, that was all. I’d spent too long in black, I forgot other colours were a thing.

I bit my lip and measured out the water with slightly more calm and control. Even if I did admit to myself - sometimes, reluctantly - that I made for a better girl than a guy, there wasn’t much point making a fuss over it. The others had enough to worry about when it came to me - _I_ had enough to worry about when it came to me - a gender identity was a stupid thing to add to the pile.

They were very impractical. And very civilian. They swished. Who wore swishy clothes. Not me.

I progressed from biting to chewing my lip, checking on Naruto as I started beating eggs. He was dubious, but seemed happy enough that I wasn't in immediate need of support, and had progressed to mimicking my stool with a clone and testing how weird the memories would be to receive once it dispelled. I should really find another one for him if he was going to come round more. Asking a guest to be their own furniture was the sort of poor hosting my mum wouldn't have approved of.

And, I realised in annoyance, I needed to find new tops, since mine had turned out to be hakama instead. Swishy hakama. That hadn’t been labelled. And had been folded so you couldn’t see what they were in the packet. Who _did_ that.

It was a relief the next morning when Kakashi showed for training, though I was wary of the fact that he had Pakkun with him again. It was only Pakkun though, no other dogs, and when Kakashi flopped into a messy cross-legged position on the bridge there was no sign of him abandoning us to d-ranks again.

“Jutsu, murderlings!” he said, eye-smiling at us. “If you’re going to not die you need to learn how to not die.”

“Sit,” Pakkun added helpfully, demonstrating by parking himself in a patch of sun.

“What jutsu?” Naruto asked as we sat. “We did tree walking and water walking, the next one must be air walking, right?”

I snorted. There was absolutely no way _air walking_ existed.

“Ah, not quite,” Kakashi said. “Though I believe there’s a cloud hopping technique somewhere that’s not far off. But! I have different plans in mind today.”

No, wait - go back to the cloud hopping. Because. Forgive my junior school understanding of the water cycle, but weren’t clouds _vapour._ How in the fuck did you _hop_ on them.

Despite my telepathic messages though, Kakashi didn’t go back. He held up his hands in a cross seal and created a pair of shadow clones; one for Naruto, to teach him a jutsu to make a burst of wind and deflect incoming missiles, and one for Sakura, to allow her to move short distances underground and attack an enemy from below.

Actually, I think Sakura got the real Kakashi - her jutsu was the one most likely to hurt her if she got it wrong. She also got Pakkun to help track her by the vibrations he felt in his paw-pads, though given that he seemed to be more concerned with his sunbeam I wasn’t sure how much help he provided.

“So,” my Kakashi, who was probably a clone, said. “Most water techniques work best on or near a body of water, but there are some that you can use anywhere. For now, at least; in the future you should be able to create your own water.”

I held myself carefully relaxed. I'd planned for this; I had arguments if I needed them. Naruto and Sakura had both got elemental techniques, it wasn’t really a surprise that Kakashi was heading a similar direction for me - it was just not the direction I was going to go in.

“Sensei,” I said, “I’m going to be a genjutsu specialist. It’s a good fit for my role in the team, and it makes sense with my other skills.” It's what I'd decided on the road to Wave when I first learnt my chakra was water natured, and though I'd got better with water I hadn't changed my mind. _On or near a body of water_ just wasn't my style. If I was in that situation, I'd need my bubblehead to breathe, and as many kawarimis as it took to get out.

He hesitated. “Genjutsu is a good support skill,” he allowed, “But illusions don’t actually block or attack anyone. They’re best at making other strategies more effective, by themselves they’re not well suited to combat.”

“That’s the point of support though,” I said. “ _I’m_ not well suited to combat by myself.”

“There’s no reason for you not to be,” he disagreed. “Your taijutsu’s good. So’s your chakra control. And you still get into fights and need to be able to win them, so the water blade -”

“Not water,” I insisted, stubbornly holding onto my calm, and when he just looked at me I lifted my chin and looked back. I didn’t want close combat techniques. I wanted to stay long range sniper-style. Support. But with genjutsu.

“Sasuke,” he said, then seemed to change his mind about what he was going to say next. “Do you need a mind healer? For - what happened.”

“What?” I blinked, thrown by the sudden topic change. “No. A _mind -_ no. Thank you. I’m fine.” Whether a mind healer meant a therapist or a Yamanaka with permission to pry, someone looking into my secrets was the _last_ thing I needed.

“Ah. Does the bubblehead work?”

“Yes?” I glanced at the others, but Sakura and Naruto both seemed to be making hand seals with either wild enthusiasm or intense concentration. I wasn’t sure what Kakashi was trying to get at, but he clearly wasn’t running through a status check with them. “It’s fine,” I said, fighting the urge to frown at him. “I’m fine. Everything’s fine, I just want to be a genjutsu specialist. Please.”

He held my gaze for a beat longer than I was comfortable with, and I did frown at him then. It seemed to shake him out of whatever thoughts had caught up to him because he nodded and settled into a more deliberately casual pose.

“Genjutsu,” he said, and some tension I didn’t even realise I had bled out of me. “Which ones do you know?”

I shook my head, relieved. I don't know if I'd expected more of a battle or not, but either way, I was glad he'd listened to me. “Only henge and the illusion bunshin.” They were the only ones the academy taught, and even they were arguably not proper genjutsu. I’d come across references to several from the clan, but no instructions for how to cast them - and anyway, most relied on a sharingan.

Kakashi nodded, frowning thoughtfully. “Those two are both external illusions. You cast them, and they’re visible to everyone - but if one person disrupts them, the whole illusion falls. Internal illusions occur in the mind, and if you want to affect multiple people you’ll need to cast - and hold - multiple illusions. Done well, it tricks the victim into filling in the details of what they see and can therefore be much more effective and harder to break than an external illusion.”

“Like the hell viewing technique,” I said. It targeted a person’s fears; I’d seen drowning because I was afraid of drowning, and my mind had supplied what it felt like from memory. I paused, thinking of Itachi’s mangekyou. “But you can also control an internal illusion and show someone what you want them to see, can’t you?”

“To an extent,” he agreed. “The more you specify the more complicated the illusion is to hold - minds are easier to persuade than to force. You’ll find the same true of external illusions as well though; something obviously fake is easier to see through than something plausible enough to be true. The strongest genjutsus are subtle - it’s not a field for flashy techniques.”

What I remembered of genjutsu from the anime disagreed with that, but I guessed extreme sneakiness and underhanded tricks didn’t make for the best TV. Kakashi had probably picked up genjutsu in ANBU; I suspected that he had different priorities then.

And as for Tsukuyomi - well, that was on an entirely different level. No need to be subtle when you’ve so obviously already won.

Background laid, which I suspect was as much stalling for time as anything else given that I’d disrupted Kakashi’s original lesson plan, he moved on to teaching me a basic illusion. The one he went for was the False Surroundings Technique, one that projected a fake reality over an area. In theory it could cover as large an area as my chakra could reach and change it to look however I wanted - though it was more suited to visual changes than other senses, and like any external illusion the whole thing would fall if one person successfully disrupted it.

“Practice using it like a henge first,” Kakashi instructed. “Except instead of hengeing yourself, you’re hengeing your environment.”

I scrunched up my nose, poking at the grass in front of me. Use it like a henge… But with a henge I was wrapping my chakra round myself to hold the illusion. So I should… do the same thing? I’d got better at reaching out with my chakra, but it felt solid to me and I usually used it to make things move. If I lay it over the grass and tried really hard _not_ to flatten the grass blades with the physical presence of my chakra, then…

“Like this?” I asked, turning approximately a square foot of grass blue. It looked flat and unrealistic, so I amended to let some of the shadows through and give it depth. Like changing a filter on photoshop, almost.

“You’re using too much yang chakra,” Kakashi disagreed, poking one of the stalks. It stayed in place, held there by the chakra I was _so carefully_ not squashing the grass with. “You need yin for genjutsu.”

“Uh.” I waited for him to elaborate, but he didn’t. Ok, then. Yin. I love yin. Team pro yin, that’s me, feminine and spiritual and all those good things.

How the fuck do you channel yin chakra.

I stared at the blue grass for a few minutes in frustration, then caved and went to ask Kakashi. He’d retreated to a shady patch and was reading his book. _Two_ of him had retreated to a shady patch to read his book, which begged the question of why he hadn’t dispelled the clones if he was done with them. I returned my attention to the damn blue grass and decided against asking him, because he was a dick, even if he was a dick who was trying a lot harder than I potentially used to give him credit for.

“Yin,” I said under my breath. “Yin. Yin. _Yin._ ”

The blue grass filled my vision. I could see the sloppy shadows where I’d tried to make the illusion see-through to give it a feeling of depth. They annoyed me. There were no highlights where the sun reflected off the grass. Between the leaves, there were bits I’d missed, and underneath them bits that were blue that weren’t meant to be. I saw the grains of soil in the dirt. I saw the fine cracks where the earth was starting to dry out, and between the gaps of them, the hair-thin thread of roots branching out in search of water. An ant walked through my patch of blue grass, and I saw its antenna waving as it searched out the colony’s scent trail.

“Oh,” I said distantly, and removed the heavy blue layer I’d applied. The grass shuddered and breathed, like I’d lifted a sheen of paint, and when I reached out again to tweak it blue I did it right. Blue grass. Veins of blue running through the leaves of the weeds dotted among it. Blue flowers, rich in violets and indigos, and the ant I turned a firey orange in contrast. The soil was brown; I made it purple-black, and the pebbles I shaded pink. They were pretty and there weren’t enough of them, so I made more, and I ran out of space in my patch of grass but there was a whole field and I could make it all blue and purple and pink with orange ants -

“Sasuke,” someone said, and they blocked my view. I saw the threads of their jacket and the split ends in their hair and I blinked and they were glass, reflecting the light into rainbows; I blinked again and took the rainbows and painted myself red and yellow and blue blue blue -

“ _Kai_ ,” they said, and my colours were gone; I glared at them and saw the swirling red in their eye and the lines of their iris and the oddly even marks of the tomoe, I saw the scar tissue round the edge where the sharingan had been implanted and never healed quite smooth, I saw their sharingan, I saw -

I ripped my gaze away and gasped, shaking myself out of it. The world faded back to normal, where the grass was just grass and ants were small and insignificant, and for a moment I missed the incredible clarity I’d seen.

“Sasuke,” Kakashi repeated, and I realised he was kneeling in front of me with his hands on my shoulders.

“I’m fine,” I said reflexively. Took a breath and let it out, then repeated myself, steadier. “I’m fine. Why do you have your sharingan uncovered?”

He raised an eyebrow but sat back on his heels. Sakura and Naruto were hovering with Pakkun, just far enough behind him that they weren’t crowding close.

“You turned the whole field blue,” he said. “I think you were working on the forest when I stopped you.”

“Oh,” I said, then his words registered. “Wait, I did? Why did you stop me?”

“How’s your chakra?” he asked instead of answering. I bit back on the _fine_ that I wanted to say and actually checked it, calling up a tendril and coiling it in my palm.

It was like trying to collect syrup with a fishing hook. I was _low._ Not quite chakra exhaustion low, but genjutsu packed a punch, apparently, and I hadn’t even been paying attention enough to see the result.

“The sharingan is dangerous,” Kakashi admonished, pulling his headband over his eye. He looked for a moment as though he were going to ask a question, then he shook his head a fraction and just said, “Congratulations on activating your blood limit.”

“The - what.” What. “No, I… don’t… have it?” I was meant to get it in the fight with Haku, but that hadn’t happened the way it went in canon so it’d never awakened. Right?

“Ah, my mistake,” Kakashi said, eye-smiling at me. “You must’ve been using that other red eye technique to enhance your genjutsu that Uchiha are famous for. Carry on, then.”

I stared. “Sakura,” I said, raising my voice. “Kakashi thinks I have a sharingan.”

“If it's the red eye thing bastard, then you do!” Naruto yelled back. He sounded certain. Why was I the last to know.

“Oh,” I said faintly. “That’s good. Hello Pakkun, why are you climbing in my lap.”

The pug gave me a completely disgusted look and flopped over to present his belly for rubs. “Puppies,” he muttered, and waved his leg until I got the message and started stroking.

I had a sharingan. And I used it to turn a whole field blue. Also Pakkun was really soft.

How nice.

It took me a week to be able to consistently use my sharingan, and longer to be familiar enough with it to see any benefit. I could turn it on fairly easily, once I knew how it felt, but _doing_ anything with it active was a completely different matter. I just - I could see _everything._ I felt in severe danger of growing a beard, giving up showers and telling Naruto that I could see the true meaning of the universe, man.

Maybe not the showers.

It was like a direct wire to my hyperfocus. Sharingan went on, the shuriken in my hand turned into the most beautiful thing in all of creation, Sakura’s punch landed squarely in my chest because I’d stopped mid spar and started drooling at my fingernails. I wasn’t even touching genjutsu with it, not until I could keep my head where it was meant to be.

When I did manage to wrestle it under control though, it was both horrifically overpowered and also slightly useless. It didn’t make me move any faster or improve any skills, but the amount of visual data I was processing made everything seem to move a fraction slower. Like - have you ever looked at a clock, and it takes a long time for the second hand to start moving but after that it ticks along normally? Like that. Brain is thinking, please hold, except brain has to think about every consecutive moment so it never resumes normal time.

I could see Naruto’s fingers forming a hand seal and know what it was before he was even halfway through. I could see Sakura’s muscles flexing as she called out her spinning blades, currently poisoned with a mild pain concoction because she didn’t actually want to kill us, and I knew which arm she was going to punch with and how much force she’d put behind it. I could also, at the same time, see a broken petal fall off a flower the other side of the training field, and that was somehow more distracting than the imminent death barrelling towards me.

In terms of which I’d like permanently etched into my subconscious the flower probably won, but still. This was not the easy shortcut to invincibility I’d been promised and it gave me killer dry eye and ate my chakra like nobody’s business. I wanted a refund.

Except, actually, my kawarimi was still limited by line of sight and the sharingan _did_ give me a massive boost on my range for it, so. That was neat. Plus my shuriken throws were reaching Haku-levels of precision. I might have to switch to senbon at this rate. Maybe. Wire was tricky with senbon, and death yoyos were a big thing to give up. Plus, it did make for hella detailed illusions, even if I wasn't yet at that stage of using it.

Not that we spent all our time on sharingan training. Or on standard training, even, though the spars were made more interesting by Sakura popping out the ground like a deadly jack in the box and Naruto casually batting aside any incoming projectiles with his wind jutsu. Both of these, I felt, were supremely unfair to someone who relied on throwing sharp and pointy things for a living, and I was making great use of non-sharinganed genjutsu to fight dirty when I got close enough to do so.

But, most of the time was spent back on - you guessed it - d-ranks.

Yeah. Them.

I’m not going to go through them for you. We weeded some fields. Repaired someone’s roof. Collected Tora-chan from yet another tree after yet another escape attempt. Introduced Kakashi’s pack to the concept of sheepdog herding and retrieved a trio of lost pigs from the shady side of town.

… That last one didn’t actually go too well. I wasn’t sure if I was misremembering how sheep dogs worked, or if pigs were inherently more contrary than sheep were, or even if Urushi was just shit at remembering the difference between away and come bye, but whatever the reason, it didn’t work. Nor did getting Naruto to henge some clones into saddles and attempting to ride the pigs back to their farm. The disastrous idea to pick the pigs up and carry them is best left unmentioned.

Apparently one and half metres of pig weighs a lot more than me, that’s all I’ll say.

So when Kakashi told us we were meeting at a different training ground the following morning, all three of us sat forward in interest.

“Special mission?” Naruto asked hopefully. “We’re ready for another c-rank Sensei, believe it!”

“Or a different kind of training?” Sakura guessed, more realistically. I just tilted my head to the side and waited. I didn’t think we’d have another c-rank mission, even if it was just a normal one that didn’t go wildly wrong. When were the chunin exams? They couldn’t be far off, and Kakashi had already said he was going to enter us. He wouldn’t risk missing the start.

… Huh. The chunin exams weren’t far off. I… had completely forgotten to plan for them.

Well that was a bit shit.

In my defence I’d had a lot going on, but I doubted Orochimaru would delay his invasion because I’d been distracted. Curse seal? No ta, not today, I’ve got a honeysuckle in need of planting and some childhood trauma to suppress. Can I interest you in a piss off with a side helping of fuck no.

“Training mission,” Kakashi confirmed. He eye-smiled and continued mildly, “Apparently you’ve been completing your d-ranks with… maa, what was it? An enthusiasm and inventiveness best kept under control, I think was the phrase.”

“Pakkun told us to,” I said, shamelessly dodging responsibility. Kakashi might be a lot more invested in the team than he had been at the start, but his attitude to d-ranks was still to supervise in a purely spiritual sense and not actually turn up. The only difference was that he’d conned the dogs into doing it for him.

“Hmm,” he said, neither agreeing with or denying my statement. The fact that Pakkun wasn’t here to defend himself had absolutely nothing to do with my choosing him to take the blame. Ridiculous.

"You could always do d-ranks with us," I pointed out. I kept my tone just light enough to not be serious, but I couldn't keep all the accusation out. I'd resorted, once, to stalking the memorial stone to see if I could find him there. I hadn't; I don't know if he'd heard me coming or if he spent the time somewhere else, but either way.

"Hmm?" he asked, somehow suddenly holding his book open and looking up from it. "What was that?"

“What do we need to bring?” Sakura asked, bringing the conversation back to the training mission and neatly skipping over the d-ranks. “Will it be overnight?”

“You know, I’ve quite forgotten,” Kakashi said, tapping the book against his chin in rueful thought.

“‘S ok, sensei,” Naruto said. “Memory problems are a normal part of growing old.”

“Ah, I remember. Don’t eat breakfast. Later, sproglets.” He waved, not even trying to make his smile convincing, and vanished in a whirl of leaves.

I turned my attention back to the problem of the chunin exams, getting to my feet on autopilot and walking in the direction of my home.

“D’you think he means it? About breakfast? Hey Sakura-chan, should we actually skip breakfast?”

Except that the chunin exams themselves weren’t actually a problem, particularly given Kakashi had already said he didn’t expect Naruto or I to be promoted. If anything, it would benefit me personally to give a poor showing - I didn’t want to reveal my skills in front of potential enemies, and I didn’t want to attract attention to myself.

Though, as ever, not _so_ poor a showing that Danzo would reallocate my eyes to a better host. Not host. Host made it sound like my eyes were parasites. Ergh.

“I think Sensei just said it because you called him old. When he told us to skip breakfast for the bell test it was a trick.”

But still; the longer I could keep the sharingan hidden, the better - we’d collectively neglected to update any of my records to include it, and no one outside the team knew I had it. The more I could fade into the background, the better. If I could avoid the exams altogether… Could I? If I withdrew, I’d take Sakura and Naruto with me. They’d be sad. Kakashi would be mad. The flippin’ _Hokage_ would probably be mad.

No, wait. Kakashi wouldn’t be mad. He’d be disappointed.

I shied away from the thought.

“Yeah, but it’s Kakashi-dick-sensei. What if he checks if we ate breakfast and we did and he knows, huh?”

Ok. So I couldn’t avoid the exams. Even if I did, no guarantee that Orochimaru wouldn’t come after me at some other point, and then I’d be in the same position as before except without any benefit from my foreknowledge. I had to take the test, and once in the forest the only ways out were via the tower or in a body bag. So. I. Speedran to the tower? But like. _Really_ fast.

Genius level planning there, bogbrain. _Genius._

“Why would he check? How would he know?”

“The bastard says he just knows things ‘cause he’s sensei. And he’d check ‘cause he’s a dick-sensei.”

But I couldn’t ask for help. I couldn't explain why I needed help, or justify to Kakashi why I wanted to pull out. I couldn’t even try to tip anyone off - my paranoia about past-me being discovered wouldn’t let me, not unless I had a concrete alibi to explain how I knew what I knew.

… My newly awakened sharingan could come with prophetic powers.

“Sasuke-kun thinks Sensei can do anything though. It’s really sweet.”

No. Fuck. No prophecies. Bad plan. _Bad plan._

“Bastard? Sakura-chan just called you sweet.”

So, what? My grand plan for dealing with Orochimaru slapping a tramp stamp on my neck was to outrun him? That was a shit plan. But fighting him was a shittier plan. Couldn’t call in allies, except the ones who were already meant to be in the forest - and they were all genin, I’d just be bringing more lambs to the slaughter. Even if they weren’t genin, it was _Orochimaru_ we were talking about. It’d still be slaughter. Hell, forget calling allies in, I should be more concerned with getting Naruto and Sakura _out_. There was no way they'd leave if I told them. I couldn't keep them safe by myself.

“Sasuke-kun?”

Itachi could keep them safe. If he wanted to. Which he would; he was still loyal, and he loved me - if he were here, Orochimaru wouldn't be a problem for any of us. What was so damn important he had to leave me behind, huh. I was the light of his life. Nothing compared to me. He should rearrange his schedule to make time for me, and stop fobbing me off with a forehead jab and a load of funerals.

“Oi, bastard.”

I blinked, tugging my lip out from between my teeth and turning my frown on Naruto. “What?” I asked, shifting my arm to protect my ribs in case he decided to elbow me again.

“What’re you thinking about?”

“World peace,” I said blithely. I was pretty sure that’s what Akatsuki was aiming for. Meant to be aiming for. Weren’t they collecting the jinchuuriki as a nuclear deterrent, or something mad like that? Or wait, was it that the jinchuuriki were already meant to be nuclear deterrents? Because if they were, they were doing a shit job. Not that I was convinced nuclear deterrent was the right way to go in the first place, but.

“Also dinner,” I continued, putting the thought firmly out of my brain. Naruto’d spent all his life being seen as a danger first and a boy a distant second. I got pissy enough at civilians who tried to do it to him, there was no way in hell I was going to spend time thinking about it myself. I had _standards._ “I want bolognese.”

Naruto pulled a face. “It’s still not how you eat noodles, bastard.”

“What’s bolognese?” Sakura asked, making a much better attempt at pronouncing it than Naruto had ever managed.

“Noodles with fish and cooked tomatoes. My obaasan used to make it. Naruto just doesn’t understand it because he’s wrong.”

“I’m not wrong!”

“Are you saying Granny is? Because I will fight you, Uzumaki. Don’t think for a moment that I won’t.”

“I’m _saying_ that noodles belong in ramen and mushy tomato noodles are weird.”

“I _saw_ you swap out with a clone - get back here you damn _coward_ -”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Kakashi: when the fuck did he get his sharingan  
> Kakashi: don't react don't react don't react  
> Kakashi: no wait he's probably excited congratulate him dammit  
> Kakashi: did he get it on the bridge? no he definitely didn't have it then  
> Kakashi: so  
> Kakashi: did he get in _another_ near death situation???  
> Kakashi: DON'T REACT  
> Kakashi: pakkun  
> Kakashi: _pakkun_
> 
> Pakkun: ... Hello problem child, here is my tummy, it's soft.


	17. Chapter 17

Eight in the morning was a weirdly late start time. It was when Kakashi had told us to meet, but it left at least an hour spare after breakfast - which, thank you, I ate with relish - that I didn’t know what to do with.

Naruto was still sprawled across the futon, occupying decidedly more than the half he was allowed. If this sleepover situation got any more permanent I was going to find a way to invent a futon bunk bed. Maybe string one to the ceiling with wire. Hammocks, ninja style.

“Hey,” I said, poking gingerly at his shoulder with my toes. “Hey, are you awake. I’m bored. Spar with me. Naruto. Hey.”

“Bass’rd,” he groaned, rolling over and trying to hide under the pillow. I shifted to a better position and kept poking. “Stopp’t. Wass time?”

“Eleven,” I lied. “We’re late. Come spar.”

He craned his neck to try and find the clock, then gave up and made a clone appear in the middle of the room. It pouted blearily and made a show of pulling its walrus cap down over one eye before staring at the clock and dispelling.

This definitely counted as an abuse of an A-rank jutsu. Naruto, you are the chakra wastage Iruka warned us about in class. Also if you’re awake enough for clones you’re awake enough to train with me. Get.

“We’ve got ages,” he complained once he received the memory.

“I’m _bored_ ,” I repeated plaintively. I’d already stretched. I’d made bentos for lunch, and I’d even peeled the grapes I’d added in for desert because the skin was tough and I deserved better in life. For mine _and Naruto’s_ lunches. _And_ I’d spent twenty minutes seeing the secrets of the universe in the washing up when I activated my sharingan. For stamina practice, and also for the cleanest damn crockery you ever saw in your _life_.

I shifted my foot to his pillow and tried to work it out from under his head. The death grip he had on it made it hard, but I was persistent. “C’mon. You’re awake. Naruto. Naruto.”

“Go feed the plants,” he growled, and abandoned his pillow in favour of retreating crab-like into an impenetrable ball of blanket. I stuck my tongue out at him, but I’d lost interest in trying to wake him up and meandered outside. Because I wanted to. Not because he told me to.

“I’ve fed the plants,” I told the fish. They didn’t all need fertiliser, and it wasn’t good to overdo it; I wasn’t due for another round of compost and fish bits for at least a fortnight. “Not koi fish bits,” I reassured the ones in my pond. “Other fish. Fish we don’t care about. Food fish.”

I frowned. It wasn’t good to overfeed the fish either, and I didn’t have any more pruning to do. The new honeysuckle was planted and doing well - not, unfortunately, spilling over the pond; apparently the berries caused problems if they fell in the water. Maybe I could get different pond flowers? A plan for the future, perhaps, but not six in the morning when no shops were open. My garden was providing less entertainment than Naruto was, and poetry was for pyjama evenings with Plushie-tan.

My gaze fell on one of the closed windows on the far side of the house. We hadn’t tried to go back into the main area, not since that disastrous first attempt. Going in to the bedrooms through the windows though didn’t bring up the same memories - I knew from frequent trips to Itachi’s room. I’d never tried going into my parent’s room that way, but… Maybe? I still needed to get Naruto that team photo.

“Wait there,” I said, flicking my fingers at the koi in a _stay_ motion. The window, when I approached it, was dark, blocked off with a screen from the inside. The wood had swollen in the frame but it opened easily enough with a shuriken to aid it, and I left my sandals on the grass as I hopped over the sill.

It wasn’t my parent’s room. Old instinct caused me to freeze, listening for other people and edging fearfully back towards the exit before I shook myself out of it. My father was dead. I was the clan head. His study was my study, I was allowed to go in.

I moved the screen aside to let the light in and padded curiously over to his desk. I’d been in here… once, I think? Twice? He used to call Itachi in a lot. Mum rarely went in, and never without him there, but I remember a couple of times she’d marched over to the door and waited impatiently for him to go in ahead of her.

I think they used it to argue in. They didn’t like disagreeing in front of us, but. We knew.

The protections on the desk were standard ones, similar to what I’d already come across around the compound. A couple of seals I still didn’t know how to get through, a few poison and chakra traps that needed disabling, and one I’d seen before but not been able to get past that I now recognised as needing a sharingan to unlock. I went for that one, working my chakra into the lock with my hyperfocussed red eyes honed in on it to guide me.

The drawer clicked open in my hand and I pulled it back with a vaguely surreal sense of trepidation. Inside there were scrolls, a heavy metal stamp seal, a calligraphy box containing a bottle of mostly-used ink and a set of beautiful brushes. Some forms. A few letters. A contract to commission a set of silk paintings, signed and dated, but still waiting for a counter signature.

I wasn’t sure what I was expecting. He wouldn’t have kept the secrets of the coup behind such flimsy protections - if he kept them written down at all. A quick scan showed that most of the papers related to day to day business dealings, budget requests from the police force, a note to a cousin to wish her and her new daughter well, a proposal to redevelop the land by the river to an area of intensive farmland that had been denied due to the population mismatch -

I frowned, pulling that one out. The land by the river wasn’t for farming. We didn’t _have_ farms inside the clan walls; the Uchiha businesses were law, through the police, and commerce, through imports and brokerage, usually exclusive contracts with luxury artisans. Maybe we had some back when the village was founded, but they’d been built over for houses ages back. Who the hell would be trying to farm?

According to the proposal, the clan. In general. Farmers to be decided. Prior experience optional. I read further, but the only reason it gave was to break our ‘dangerous and unsupportable dependency’ on Konoha to sell us food, which. Didn’t sound quite right? When I flicked to the last page I found the denial note. In meandering legalese it said that the clan’s size didn’t justify it - apparently there were less of us than the growth models the proposal was based on predicted, and we were needed in other roles.

That was it. It was dated several months before the massacre and didn’t make much sense to be at the top of my father’s paperwork pile, unless he was still working on it. Maybe he was; if we were outgrowing the Uchiha district, that’d be a reason to push for the coup - except that, according to the latest clan census, we weren’t.

I knew what the suspiciously missing Uchiha said to me, but… Would anyone else have made the connection? If there even was a connection. I didn’t have any _proof_ of bloodline theft before the massacre itself. ROOT, as far as I could remember, did not have sharingans.

Though if they did, maybe Danzo would be less interested in mine.

The sound of the hot water pump made me startle, frantically rolling the scroll shut and replacing it exactly as I’d found it in the drawer. My heart was racing, and it wasn’t till I’d already reset most of the traps that I remembered it was Naruto I was hearing in the shower. I stopped, pulling a face at myself and telling my fight-or-flight reflex to chill out.

“It’s just _Naruto_. Frick’s sake.” What was he going to do, tell me off for being in my own study? Idiot. It didn’t stop me moving everything back into place and dropping almost guiltily out the window again - which I acknowledge was a stupid reaction but which I justified by not wanting to jeopardize Itachi’s secrets by airing clan matters outside the clan. Even if denied farm proposals were only loosely connected to him, it still counted.

“If he asks, I’ve been feeding the plants,” I reminded the fish. “And stretching. You can tell him I was stretching. Only if he asks. No, wait - I’ve been looking for the photo, that’s what I’ve been doing.”

They mouthed hopefully at the surface in search of pellets, but it wasn’t any better to overfeed them now than it had been fifteen minutes ago. Naruto was still in the shower, and now that I knew which window was the study I could easily work out which was my parents’ room. I’d promised him the photo ages ago. I should get it. It wouldn’t take long.

I felt even more like I was trespassing than I had in the study; at least there it was tidy, impersonal, and somewhere I had actually been before, if rarely. My parents’ room though was… full of them. The bed had a white quilt, hand embroidered with blue flowers. The wood was old mahogany, polished enough that it still held some shine, the chest of drawers had dragons curling around each drawer front. I ran my fingers over them, half expecting the carved wood to feel warm.

It wasn’t messily full. Everything was neat, precise in a way I’d never managed in my kitchen. There was nothing hanging on the walls, though one of the screens had a branching cherry tree painted on in broad strokes of black ink. On one of the dressers there was a penguin, chiseled out of a dark wood and inlaid with mother of pearl for the white belly. I’d never seen a penguin in Konoha. It wasn’t associated with the Uchiha. This one had a crudely made haori wrapped round it in the style my father usually wore, like an oddly somber penguin doll, and it was standing next to a white-painted crane in a flowing purple kimono.

The photos were next to it. Lots of photos; Mum and Kushina and a boy I didn’t recognise with a sensei I’d never met, Mum and Kushina pregnant and laughing, Mum as a little girl with flower pins in her hair, a dark-haired teenager who grinned and looked too much like my dad to be allowed to be that carefree, Itachi as a small child, Itachi with his headband, Itachi with his arms full of baby me, Itachi with mum and she was smiling and I was smiling and Itachi had already learnt to copy Father’s heavy stare because he was Uchiha and the hottest fire is the red ember in the centre and not the fickle flame -

The sharp cracking sound the photo frame made when I slammed it into the wood seemed too loud and too sudden in the silence. I stood by the dresser, hand pressing it down as though the picture were going to leap out at me, and fought to blink off my sharingan. It was _way_ too easy to activate when it wasn’t necessary. Which it wasn’t. It was a picture. A damn _picture_. And the quiet; that was because the shower pump had stopped, Naruto was going to be done in a second, I didn’t want him to come looking for me. I grabbed the two photos of Kushina and turned my back on the penguin and the crane, and it was only when I was already out the window that I realised I’d also grabbed a pair of flower pins, gold with red enamel on the tiny flower heads. I stared at them in confusion. They were the same ones my mum had been wearing in her photo, and now that I was holding them I could see that they’d been sharpened to serve as hidden weapons, but I didn’t have time to go back and replace them.

“Remember your training,” I muttered to the fish as I went past. “Stretching, plants, photo. Don’t let me down.”

I wasn’t convinced by their silence, but Naruto was stunned enough by the photos that the study and the clan coup never came up. It potentially wouldn’t have done anyway, but it never hurt to be prepared.

I was not prepared though for Naruto to be as affected by Mum as by Kushina.

“I know her,” he said, staring at the picture of the two of them laughing. Mum was heavily pregnant in that one, Kushina maybe a few months behind - though with the exaggerated baby-bump pose it was hard to tell. “She used to be at the market. I thought she worked there.” He blinked, then glanced at me and covered his reaction with a squinty-eyed smile while I frowned in confusion. “Ah, I guess not if she was your mum! Hey, bastard, when’s your birthday?”

“July,” I said slowly. He… could have just seen her shopping? Maybe? I didn’t know how to ask and he clearly wanted to move on. But. He was doing the bad smile that meant he was actually sad? “Um, 23rd July.”

“July? I was born in October, that makes you…” he counted. “Two months older than me? Two and a half?” He turned back to the photo, tracing a finger over Kushina’s brilliant, familiar grin, and when he continued his voice was quieter. “You think… Maybe?”

“She looks like you,” I said honestly.

“Oh.” He sounded like he was about to cry. He also didn’t ask about my mum again, so he was probably just thrown by seeing Kushina. That didn’t feel quite right, but like I said. I didn’t know how to ask.

I bumped my shoulder against his instead. “Guess you’re stuck with me then,” I said, attempting to lighten the atmosphere. “Can’t argue with mothers. Not worth the effort.”

It didn’t make him look any less like he was going to cry, but it did make him grin an Uzuamaki-grin at me and I couldn’t help but smile back, pleased to have made him happy.

Training ground six was at the base of the Hokage Mountain, where jagged, near-vertical rock faces met the sloped, grass-covered ground and the trees made allowances for the lack of flat surfaces by growing a bit smaller and a bit more sideways than usual.

Never underestimate a Konoha tree. These things will grow on your damn bones if you let them, wrapping their roots around the overhangs and into the crevices at the base of the mountain was _nothing_.

Sakura was already there when we arrived, waving us over to a good spot she’d found among some of the larger rocks. I nodded a distracted hello, still turning the clan and my mum over in my mind, and followed a step behind Naruto as he picked his way through the training ground towards her. He called a cheerful good morning to her and, a beat later, a surprised but no less cheerful good morning to Ino as well.

I knew, vaguely, that Obito had engineered things so the clan was disliked after the Kyuubi debacle, but… the coup meant the clan was wrong, right? So even if it was horrible that Itachi killed them and Danzo was evil, Itachi was still, kind of, doing the right thing? Even if they were my parents. My mum had to die. Because. Itachi didn’t have a choice. Right?

Wait.

_Ino?_

“Sasuke-kun!”

My shoulders hunched and my face closed off before I’d even finished pulling myself back to reality. Why was Ino here. What did she want. Why was she shuffling over and patting the ground next to - no.

Without caring how rude it was, I reached forward and tugged Naruto to a halt, then physically moved him until I was in front and he was between me and Ino. Then, to make sure he got the hint, I pulled down on his jacket until he gave me an amused but chiding frown and sat down.

I did not sit. It wasn’t safe. I perched, resting on my heels on the edge of one of the larger rocks so I was taller than the others and had a good line of sight to escape if need be. Not that I was _scared_ of Ino, you understand. I wasn’t. I’d been better than her at most things in the academy and I was fairly confident I could still take her in a fight, except I was also fairly confident that Sakura would be unimpressed if I tried.

“Sasuke-kun is so cool,” Ino said to Sakura in a sotto voice that carried far too well. “He’s all brooding and mysterious… I can’t believe you got to be on a team with him!”

I was stone. Marble. I was a calcified fossil. I was - but _why_ couldn’t she have wanted to fight. I could do fighting. I just, what the hell do you _say_ to that? _Thank you?_ Please stop? I’m glad you noticed, I worked hard on it all week? No. None of it. _Go away._

Naruto leaned back to jostle his shoulder against my shins, and I flicked my gaze to him miserably without letting my expression change. He caught my eye just long enough for his questioning look to turn into a resolved one, then turned back forward with a squinty-eyed smile.

“Ah, don’t worry Ino-chan! He’s not cool when you get to know him. You don’t want to have a crush on him, he’s not even mysterious in real life.”

I cracked the faintest smile for a second before I schooled my features back into their blank mask, and kicked a foot forwards to nudge him in thanks. I wasn’t sure how effective his statement was, given the way Ino’s face creased in offense, but bless him for trying.

“Naruto! Don’t be so rude to -”

“Jeez, woman,” Shikamaru complained, slouching towards us with his hands in his pockets and Chouji following a step behind. “Why are you so loud so early?”

I had mixed reactions to his arrival; on the one hand, it pretty much solidified the fact that the training mission Kakashi had set up for us today would be a joint one with Team Ten and I didn’t get on with two thirds of them, but on the _other_ hand, Chouji.

I couldn’t help it. I perked up. I hadn’t seen Chouji for ages, and even Shikamaru’s bleary-eyed glare wasn’t going to get between us. Chouji meant _snacks_ and like the Pavlovianly trained sucker that I was I immediately started running through what I had to give him. Lunch? There were cold noodles in my bento. No, grapes - _peeled_ grapes. Everyone loved peeled grapes.

“I have grapes,” I announced, leaning sideways to look around Shikamaru.

“Morning Sasuke,” Chouji said, smiling bemusedly. I scooted up closer to Naruto to make space on the rock for him.

“Yes,” I said. “It is. Sit.” And, despite Shikamaru’s dark look and audible disapproval, Chouji did - though he sat on the floor rather than the rock and I had to wriggle my ungainly way down to sit next to him.

“Huh,” Naruto said, looking between us. “I forgot you two were friends.”

I wrinkled my nose. “We aren’t. I don’t have friends. I’m rude and standoffish, I don’t like people.”

“No, you just mooch off them,” Shikamaru grumbled. I stuck my tongue out at him and waved the grape box from my bento in protest.

“It’s ok, I don’t mind,” Chouji said. He took a grape, but I think more because I insisted than because he wanted it, and tilted his bag of seaweed strips towards me. Shikamaru pulled a face in the background, not even trying to be subtle about what he thought, and I resisted the urge to smirk smugly in his direction.

I bet Chouji would appreciate my tuna-tomato-noodle attempt at bolognese. I doubted I’d ever make it for him - I only made it for Naruto because he was at mine at dinner and if I left him to his own devices he’d eat nothing but ramen which even _I_ knew was nutritionally lacking - but if I did, I bet he’d appreciate it.

“No _way_ ,” Ino hissed, then squeaked and flushed red when we looked over at her. Sakura made frantic shushing motions that she hid and tried to play off as nonchalant, practically broadcasting the fact that they’d been gossipping. Because, you know. Ninja. Subtle. Sneaky. Like a mouse, but a mouse with a mariachi band trailing its every move.

“What way?” Naruto asked.

“Nothing!” Sakura said. “Absolutely nothing, boring thing, girly thing.” Ino nodded frantically, gaze flicking between Naruto and me and Chouji and me fast enough that it was a wonder she didn’t get a headache. I frowned, already retreating behind my emotionless mask - which was a damn nuisance, I was holding a piece of nori and I couldn’t eat when I was being unreadable. “Spar!” Sakura blurted. “We should. Spar. While we’re waiting for our senseis.”

“O… kay?” Naruto squinted doubtfully, but when Sakura only shook her head at him he let it drop. “Ok! We should spar - Team Seven against Team Ten, you won’t know what hit you, believe it!”

“Troublesome,” Shikamaru drawled. “All of us attacking like that would be chaos. We should take turns to spar one on one.”

“Battles are chaos though,” Sakura pointed out.

Ino sniffed an agreement. “Don’t try to pawn your laziness off as clever planning. But if we’re sparring one on one - Sasuke-kun,” and here she _batted her eyelashes at me_ what the _fuck_ is the socially acceptable response to that because it’s probably not crushing your seaweed into a fine green powder in your fist, “You should spar with me so you finally have someone who can keep up with you, hm?”

She didn’t look at Naruto as she said it, but she did slant a triumphant side-eye at Sakura. And yeah, maybe back at the academy Ino had been one of the top taijutsu students, _maybe_ she was quick in a way that neither Sakura or Naruto would ever be, _may fucking be_ I hadn’t had a real speed challenge since the shitshow with Haku - but ex _cuse_ me? Ino had got double-knock out with canon Sakura in the chunin exams. _My_ Sakura had chainsaw arms and broke people’s unbeatable ice mirrors by hitting them _really hard._ Ino _wished_ she could keep up with Sakura.

Sakura who was trying to catch my eye and gesture at me to climb down because apparently she thought it was fine for people to casually undermine everything she’d achieved, but I lifted my chin and stubbornly pretended not to see.

“We actually had a different plan for today kiddos,” a new voice said. I reigned in my temper to a muttering boil and stole another nori from Chouji, turning to look at the bearded man that had just joined us. He wore a standard Konoha uniform with a sash tied round his waist - I didn’t recognise the symbol on it, though assuming that this was Asuma I guessed it would be… the guardian twelve? The twelve guardians? A temple? I couldn’t remember. Something he’d done outside the village at some point.

“Though as Kakashi doesn’t appear to be here yet, I suppose you could spar while we wait… Hm. What time does he usually turn up?”

“For about seven minutes sometime after lunch,” I answered grumpily. It was an exaggeration. Mostly. Pakkun trained us more than he did, he was allergic to doing d-ranks with us, and now it looked like he was adding Asuma to the roster, and though this probably said dire things about the direction he was taking his teaching role in I was too busy being annoyed at Ino to care.

Look, she needed sharp pointy things thrown at her for insulting Sakura, but if I agreed to spar with her it’d look like I was doing what she asked and that wasn’t on the cards. My best hope was that whatever team exercise the jounins had planned would provide the opportunity. Hopefully while also showing off how spectacularly Sakura outclassed the entirety of Team Ten. How Sakura _and Naruto_ outclassed the entirety of Team Ten, because I bet everyone was dismissing him as well.

Because they were _idiots._

Except Chouji.

“Ah,” Asuma said. “That does sound like him.” He deliberated for a moment, then turned to us decisively. “Right then teams, listen up! You’ve probably guessed we’re running a joint exercise. You’ll be working against each other to simulate a mission working against enemy ninjas; Sakura, I’m told you’re the leader of Team Seven -” _hah fuckers, see that?_ “- and Shikamaru, you’ll take the other leader position.

“Shikamaru’s team, your job is to get this clone,” he held his hands out in a seal and created a bunshin, “over to the other side of the training field, where I will be waiting. The bunshin is deliberately weak to mimic a civilian; it won’t fight or use chakra, and one hit will dispel it. Sakura, your team has to prevent the bunshin reaching its target.”

I leaned forward, warily excited despite my earlier annoyance. Assassination mission? Sabotage? It had definite potential. With Sakura’s hiding in the earth techniques and my stealth we’d be overwhelming Team Ten with a hoard of Narutos before they even knew we were there.

“Rules,” Asuma continued. “You may engage each other in combat. No permanent damage, and if your opponent is in place to give you a killing blow, bow out and be dead for the rest of the exercise. Listen to your team leader. Treat the bunshin like a client. You have an hour time limit - if the bunshin is alive but still hasn’t reached me, I’ll count it as a win for Sakura’s team. Got it?”

We nodded. I wondered, vaguely, if Asuma laid rules like that for every exercise Team Ten did. Kakashi was much more of a _figure it out_ kind of rule giver.

“Alright then. Teams! Ino and Chouji, you’ll be with Sakura; Shikamaru, you’ve got Sasuke and Naruto. Sakura’s team, come with me; both teams get five minutes to plan, then I’ll start the hour timer.”

Silence.

_Crickets._

“Sensei, you’ve got the teams wrong,” Ino pointed out. “Shouldn’t it be Team Ten versus Team Seven?”

“Hm, no,” Asuma said, entirely too pleased with himself for a man who was blatantly wrong. “Coming, team Sakura?”

No. No she wasn’t. Except - she looked between me and Naruto unsurely, then got to her feet with a thoughtful frown. Fine, ok, we were on the offensive - I could do that. I started getting my feet under me to get up and follow her, only to find myself frozen in place halfway through the motion.

I looked down, then followed my shadow back to Shikamaru.

Bitch _._

“See you later I guess,” Sakura said with a meaningful emphasis, signing a quick _stay_ by her side with the signals Kakashi had started teaching us. Ino and Chouji followed and I glared unhappily after them, refusing to shift from my half-crouched position even when Shikamaru released me.

“So,” he said into the awkward silence that fell when they’d left. “Guess you’re with me.”

“Get fucked, Nara.”

“ _Bastard._ ”

I bared my teeth at Naruto, mind whirling. Underneath the underneath - was I meant to sabotage Shikamaru? The bunshin was barely three metres away from me, I could easily give Sakura the win. It felt like too obvious an out, but Kakashi’s impossible missions usually had a twist like this behind them - except, Asuma didn’t seem the type. But; Kakashi was pushing Sakura towards a promotion. Shikamaru was, if I remembered correctly, the _only_ one of the Rookie Nine to be promoted in canon, so it wasn’t a stretch to assume that Asuma was pushing him too.

Chunin had to lead teams. Sometimes teams they weren’t familiar with. Protection missions like Shikamaru was running and low-stakes interception missions like Sakura was running were both classic c-rank missions a chunin would be asked to lead. The leap of logic here was obvious.

It was also shit and I didn’t like it.

“Are you going to be like this the whole time?” Shikamaru asked, everything from his drawl to his posture radiating how unimpressed he was. I briefly considered that he might be putting it on deliberately to draw out a reaction, then discarded the thought. Even if he was, it didn’t change anything. I still didn’t like him.

“You’re the leader,” I shot back. “Fixing team issues is your job, not mine.” Naruto fidgeted uncomfortably next to me, clearly unsure what to do with my hostility.

I took a breath and tried to settle. There was a line between being an asshole and actively spoiling for a fight and I was pretty sure I was tap dancing over it, but having Team Ten sprung on me by surprise had done a number on my nerves. I hadn’t realised how much things had changed in the few months I’d been with Team Seven until I was faced with people from the academy again, and the stark contrast was highlighting things I was happier forgetting.

Ino reminded me that I was the fabled last Uchiha. I didn’t want to be the fabled last Uchiha. The last Uchiha had a stupid blood limit that made people want to kill him. Or date him. Eyeballs, out for stud - there was a list.

Shikamaru reminded me that I was a dick, that I didn’t know how to interact with my peers because they _weren’t_ my peers, and that I was full of secrets like gaping holes that my insides would fall out of if I relaxed my guard enough to let them.

Also he didn’t like me hanging around Chouji because Shikamaru was also a dick, but that was less a creeping realisation and more just a fact of life.

And Chouji… didn’t remind me of anything. Naruto and Sakura were teammates, something deeper and harder to define than friendship. Kakashi was complicated. Itachi hurt. Chouji just liked sharing chips.

I loved Chouji.

“Fine,” I said, flattening my temper into something resembling calm. “What’s the plan.”

“I don’t know yet,” Shikamaru said, watching me intently. I held back my sarcastic response. “I don’t have enough information. What’re your strengths and weaknesses, and what’s Sakura likely to do that we can exploit?”

Nope. “Changed my mind,” I said. “Get fucked again Nara.” Team Seven’s weaknesses were for Team Seven. There was _no way on earth_ I was sharing that info. Not for the Hokage, not for Shikamaru, not under pain of death or torture. _No._

Naruto, I noticed, was staying silent. I didn’t know if that was a show of support or if he was just not getting involved in a feud that’d been going on practically since the first time I dared sit with Chouji, but either way I was grateful he wasn’t contradicting me.

Shikamaru leaned back. “Troublesome,” he drawled, in a way that was obviously leading. “I thought Hatake was big on teamwork. Clearly not something he managed to pass on.”

_Obviously leading._ I bristled, thought _fuck it_ , and took the bait. “Do you have a point?”

“Only that if this is a test for me as a leader then it’s a test for Sakura as well. She’ll hardly be able to prove herself if her enemy isn’t able to put up a fight - but I guess you don’t care about that.”

Oh, _bitch._ And because it wasn’t satisfying enough to keep it in my head, I said it out loud as well. “You’re a bitch, Nara. Leave the manipulation to Yamanaka, you’re shit at it.”

He raised an eyebrow, lazy in his confidence. “Was I wrong?”

I scowled and refrained from answering. “Sakura’s strong,” I bit out ungracefully. “She’s best suited to an all out assault. I’m fast and stealthy. Basic genjutsu, kawarimi. Naruto’s tricky and has clones.”

“Lots of clones,” Naruto joined in, tension bleeding from him with relief. “I can henge them as well - solid henge, so if you need gear I can make it.”

Shikamaru nodded, eyes sharp. “How durable?”

“One good hit to dispel, but I can make more. What are you thinking?”

He steepled his fingers, frowning at us as he considered our skills and thought through the plan, and I fought to hide a chill of foreboding.

The chunin exams were coming soon. I’d let myself get distracted by Naruto and Sakura, but seeing Team Ten again reminded me: less than a month after the exams finished, I’d be leaving. Missing nin. An enemy of Konoha, even if I’d know that wasn’t true.

Shikamaru’s ridiculous intelligence gained whole new dimensions when you were looking at it from the opposite side of the battlefield.

I had the brief, quickly stifled thought that Sakura was just as smart.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've been waiting to bring Team Ten back for _weeks_ I love them.
> 
> I also had this chapter written before I wrote the piece for the Uchiwa, and returning to Fugaku and Mikoto in a different context was weirdly jarring when I was editing. Which segues neatly into: apologies for the day delay, I accidentally got distracted fix-it ficcing the Uchiha. I think though that I may drop back to every three days / twice a week updates, I've been running a bit close to the wire recently with getting chapters up on time!


	18. Chapter 18

“Well,” Asuma said, forty seven minutes later. “That could have gone better.”

“What’re you talking about?” Naruto protested. “We got the bunshin to you, we passed the mission.”

“On a technicality!” Ino jeered, looking up from the slice to her thigh she was putting pressure on. “If that’d been a real mission -”

“If that’d been a real mission,” I cut in, “The wire would’ve been poisoned and you would be dead. Also I would’ve stabbed Chouji.”

“I appreciate that you didn’t,” he said with a smile. I didn’t. Not stabbing Chouji had meant trying to knock him out instead, and I’d thoroughly misjudged how much force that would require. If I’d gone with my gut to begin with I wouldn’t have been quite so close to being crushed to death by a Chouji-sized bowling ball. _Yes_ I was fast and yes he was easy enough to doge, but how, please, was any of that meant to help when I had to get close anyway and spend _way too long_ clinging on and trying to make him go unconscious. I was a precision instrument, I wasn’t meant to be used against a friggin _tank_.

“If it’d been a real mission you’d’ve stayed on stealth where you were meant to be,” Shikamaru said, still sore about my creative interpretation of his plan.

I sniffed, deliberately dismissive. “What’s the point of stealth if you can’t sneak attack?”

“We were running _protection._ ”

“To be fair, Sasuke-kun did make our job harder,” Sakura defended. “If you’d let Naruto provide backup earlier like he wanted to we’d’ve been distracted enough for you to complete the mission.”

“But we did complete the mission, Sakura-chan.”

“If you’d had a clearer strategy, he wouldn’t have caused you so much trouble,” Shikamaru said. His tone was as drawling and lazy as ever, but he wasn’t as good at hiding his annoyance as he thought. I resisted the urge to smirk; I’d done my part, which was to give Sakura a good opponent to showcase her leadership skills against. That was what Shikamaru had conned me into agreeing to do.

Giving him a good underling to showcase _his_ leadership skills over… Nah. Didn’t feel like it. Imagine if Kakashi got the idea that I was good at working with other people. Yuck.

“Different styles have different benefits,” Asuma said, quelling the discussion with a frown before it could go any further. “Sakura, your ability to make plans on the fly and enact them during combat is impressive, though be aware that many teams prefer a more structured approach. Shikamaru, your strategy was efficient and well executed, but you need to account for things you can’t predict or control.” He smiled, softening his stern expression. “On the whole though, I’m pleased with how you both handled working with unfamiliar teams, despite the difficulties.”

I leaned back on my hands and projected an air of innocence. What difficulties. No difficulties. He was imagining things.

“However,” he continued, “While Shikamaru’s team technically completed the mission, I’m not going to award them the point. The rules said to treat the bunshin as a client; using the replacement technique to remove it from the midst of an ongoing battle does _not_ qualify.”

It… didn’t? “I saved it though?” I’d also used the move before to get Tazuna to safety. Or who I thought was Tazuna at the time, even if it later turned out to be Kakashi under henge.

“Clients are delicate,” Kakashi said, speaking up for the first time. Not looking up from his book, of course, but speaking was a plus. He’d arrived some time during the exercise, and I think this was the first thing he’d said to us since then. “You have to play nice with them or they break.”

Well, yeah, but… I didn’t exactly have time to call an uber. Clients should prioritise being alive over being comfy.

“Hey, Asuma-sensei, what’s the point for?” Naruto asked. “Do we get prizes?”

“Think of it more as an ongoing tally,” Asuma said. “A way to help you keep track of your rivalry. Like I said though, no point today kids.”

Shikamaru and I shared a look of horror, for once in mutual agreement. _Rivalry?_ Did the entire village have a fixation on rivals, or was everyone so incapable of forming healthy friendships that rivalries were all they had left? But more to the point, a rivalry with _them?_ “Today implies tomorrow,” I said, breaking eye contact with a shudder of distaste. _Agreement._ With Shikamaru. Ergh, I felt unclean. “Tomorrow implies doing this again.”

Kakashi clapped his hands together, eye curved up in a smile that was far too happy to be real. “Maa, Sasuke-kun, if you want to keep working with Team Ten you only need to ask. As your beloved Sensei I’m always here to arrange these things for you.”

I scowled. I’d probably walked into that one. 

Ino crowed something triumphantly in the background and Sakura shot her a pleased grin. I was happy that they’d apparently made up and everything, but could they please respect that some people were horrified over here. I opened my mouth to rescue the situation and keep Team Seven as just Team Seven -

“Troublesome,” Shikamaru complained, and I swallowed my words.

“You know what, Kakashi-sensei,” I said, leaning forward earnestly. “I’d love to work with Team Ten. Maybe we could teach them fetch.”

The glare Shikamaru shot me was a thing of pure beauty, and the poor bastard didn’t even know what fetch was. I smirked, tilting it up into a sweet smile just because I could. I even added an eye-smile. Because I could.

_Suffer,_ Nara.

_Interlude: A deer, a boar, and a butterfly walk into a barbeque restaurant_

“Sooo,” Ino said leadingly. “Team Seven. Thoughts. Spill.”

“It was nice to see them,” Chouji said. “Can you pass the pork?”

She passed it. “This is not the gossip I was hoping for. Shikamaru. We’re having team talk, join in.”

“Tch, have team talk with Chouji.”

“Chouji can’t gossip, he doesn’t understand. He just compliments people behind their back. Shikamaru, I have a _need_ for proper talk. Did you see what Sakura did with her hair? It looked so foreign.”

“I thought it looked nice,” Chouji said. Ino waved him off and stole one of Shikamaru’s ribs as punishment for him not joining in.

“Of course it looked nice, she’s beautiful. But where do you think she learned it? What if she met a mysterious paramour on the c-rank she was talking about and he taught her the ways of his people from his far off land?”

“Paramour?” Shikamaru repeated, looking vaguely disturbed. “What the hell, woman? Wave’s not _far off_.” 

“I thought she liked Sasuke?” Chouji added. “Wasn’t that the big thing about you two hating each other?”

“Oh, hush. We didn’t hate each other. We were love rivals. But we’re not anymore. She said,” and here Ino leaned in, scowling at Shikamaru until he rolled his eyes and shifted forward in his seat in the barest attempt at a proper gossip pose, “She thinks Sasuke-kun’s gay. He doesn’t know yet so you can’t say anything, but she’s pretty sure he’s got a crush on Naruto. Apparently they’re both oblivious and adorable.”

“Whoop di doo, poor Naruto.”

Chouji wrinkled his nose. “If he doesn’t know, then couldn’t they just be friends? Maybe he’s really private about it and he doesn’t want us discussing him when he’s not there.”

“Oh come on, Chouji. He’s clearly gay - I was flirting with him all day and he didn’t even notice. This is the best gossip, stop being so limp just because Sasuke’s your friend.” She crossed her arms with a huff, then paused as a thought occurred to her. “Wait. When did you and Sasuke-kun become friends anyway?”

“Chouji fed him,” Shikamaru answered. “Because he was incapable of feeding himself and instead of learning he just took advantage of Chouji and hasn’t stopped. Like mould.”

“His whole family died,” Chouji protested. “He wasn’t taking advantage, my mum gave me extra for him. And he’s not mould. Also he shares his snacks as well, mould wouldn't do that.”

Ino made a noise of triumph, punctuating it with a decisive fist pump. “He gives you _strawberries,_ ” she said, remembering from the academy. “It’s the classic romantic gift!” She gasped, eyes growing wide with the possibilities. “He’s _shy_ , that’s it - he’s been secretly confessing to you for years ever since you were kind to him when he needed it most, but he doesn’t know how to tell you because he’s too naive to realise that his feelings are more than just friendship. It’s a love story!”

“It’s _not,_ ” Shikamaru said with finality. “You’re being troublesome.”

“Besides, I thought he liked Naruto?” Chouji added. He looked somewhat confused, but also vaguely flattered and doubting in the way of someone with low self esteem learning that someone else might consider them attractive.

“Only because they’re on a team together. He actively avoided Naruto back at the academy. Unless - Sakura. My _love rival._ ” Her eyes gained a disturbing glint and Chouji edged away, though not without taking a chicken skewer as he went. “She’s setting him up with Naruto. Oooh, we can’t let her win - Chouji! As your teammate and wingwoman I’m rooting for you, don’t let me down!”

“Um,” Chouji said, sharing a glance with Shikamaru. It wasn’t a very helpful glance, as Shikamaru had buried his head in his arms and was apparently trying to will himself into a coma. “That’s very kind of you, but I don’t think I’m, um, gay?”

“A minor obstacle on the road to love! Shikamaru, get off your ass - we need a _strategy_.”

Shikamaru resolutely didn’t answer. When Ino turned to Chouji instead, he stuffed the whole chicken skewer in his mouth in one go and smiled helplessly at her.

“Hopeless,” she muttered, and settled into her thinking pose. She’d been competing with Sakura for Sasuke for _ages._ She wasn’t about to let a little thing like the game changing stop her from winning.

_Interlude continues: a boar goes home, a deer and a butterfly take the long way round_

“You really think Sasuke has a crush on me?”

Shikamaru rolled his eyes. “No.” He’d had to spend a whole day attempting to wrangle Sasuke into deigning to work with him. Spending the whole evening continuing to talk about him wasn’t exactly what he’d planned.

“Oh,” Chouji said, and Shikamaru frowned and hastened to amend.

“Not because of you. You know I don’t mean that. Sakura probably thinks he’s gay to explain why he won’t return her feelings, that’s all.”

Chouji flashed him a quick smile, then hummed in thought. “I don’t think that’s it,” he said. “She didn’t seem like she still liked him like that. She’s changed a lot since the academy.”

Potentially. Shikamaru had analysed her fighting style enough to know that she was quick thinking and straightforward, but still able to think unpredictably when she needed to - though, he’d known that back at the academy as well. The fact that she was so confident in herself was new, and he kind of wished Ino had spent more time finding out how Sakura ended up as team leader rather than wondering where she learnt her hair style from. As far as the rest went with the crushes and the girl talk and the everything, ergh. No. He’d preferred not to analyse. He shrugged his acceptance of Chouji’s statement; if Chouji said she didn't like him like that, then she probably didn't, but Shikamaru had better things to work out than why girls did the things girls did.

There was a pause, then Chouji hesitantly offered, “Naruto’s changed too. And. So’s Sasuke.”

Shikamaru pulled a face. “I’m not going to like him, Chouji. I don’t care if you do.”

“ _I_ care,” Chouji said. He made what for him counted as a frustrated sound, though it was only that Shikamaru knew him so well that he could pick it up. “I just think you’d get on with him if you actually tried. I’m allowed to have more than one friend without them being jealous at each other all the time.”

“I’m not _jealous_ ,” Shikamaru bristled. “And that’s not why I don’t like him. He’s a liar. And he’s not your friend, he even said.”

“Well I’m his,” Chouji said with blunt finality. It was an old argument, and Shikamaru knew better than to push; Chouji’s unwavering loyalty was something he - usually - appreciated about him, but of _all people_ to give that loyalty to. “And he’s not a liar. He just doesn’t know how to say things sometimes. I think Naruto and Sakura are good for him though, I’m glad he has them.”

“Yeah. Sure. Maybe they’ll turn him into a real person, who knows.” He said it sourly, but… Sasuke hadn’t been a real person since his family died. Maybe liar wasn’t the right word. Maybe Shikamaru was being too harsh on him - a clan is a hell of a thing to lose, and he still remembers his own disbelief when he’d pressed his dad for answers and learnt the actual truth - but when Sasuke came back afterwards, he came back wrong and Shikamaru was the only damn person to see it.

There was something horribly unsettling about knowing that the guy cautiously attaching himself to your best friend was putting on an act with everything he did. Watching, mimicking, making mistakes he shouldn’t have made; Sasuke wasn’t rude and standoffish. Or, if he was later, then it was something he’d learnt, another layer of his mask. But before he learnt to hide himself, he was scared. Of the teachers, of the kids, of the _village_. He held himself like he was surrounded by enemies. He covered his secrets so well that Shikamaru couldn’t work out what they were, and the Sasuke that left the academy the day before the Uchiha died shouldn’t have been able to do that.

He’d mentioned it to Chouji once. Chouji had said, _oh, I don’t want him to be scared. You think he misses his mum?_ and Shikamaru hadn’t been able to make him see how that explanation didn’t fit. Even if everyone else just accepted that he was different because of course he would be, his whole life had changed around him. But it. Didn’t _fit._

“Shika?” Chouji said, bringing him out of his thoughts. “Just. Try? He’s a good person. He used to get mad at people who called me fat.”

“So would anyone with sense, that’s not enough to make him good.” Chouji didn’t let up though, and Shikamaru huffed unhappily. Fine. Like he said, maybe he was being too harsh. Sasuke seemed less scared now than he had been before, and the masks had, maybe, relaxed. Other friends were clearly good for him. Other friends who weren’t Shikamaru’s first.

And if Sasuke _was_ being more honest with his reactions, then his extreme awkwardness every time Ino flirted with him was objectively hilarious. How she thought he hadn’t noticed was a mystery. And yes, Shikamaru was fully aware that a better person wouldn’t laugh at someone else’s misfortune like this, but Sasuke was as much of a shit to him in return and wouldn’t hesitate to laugh if the roles were reversed. They evened out.

“Shika?”

“Yeah, yeah. I’ll give him a chance. If he blows it, I make no promises.”

Compared to the morning, an afternoon of d-ranks just wasn’t that exciting. Then again, they weren’t particularly supposed to be, and at least these ones were fairly simple - mostly errand running. It was good practice for using the tree-walking technique to scale walls and roof hop, at least, and it was amusing taking shortcuts along the narrowest ledges I could find. The washing line, potentially, was a bit bold; I’d had to use an arm of chakra to balance myself against the ground for that one, but I’d still made it to the other side without knocking any of the pegs off, so. Who was the real winner here?

“Huh,” Naruto said, half way through a shopping run for a lady who’d broken her leg. “They replaced the sushi place.”

I slowed, pausing next to him with a frown. “Sushi?” It rung a bell, but I didn’t eat out much.

“The one you didn’t like. You said they had bad fish.”

“Oh.” Old lady Emiko. Emiyo. Ekiyo? She’d insulted Naruto. “The fish was probably fine, the owner was stupid. She’s not running this one as well, is she?” I wrinkled my nose at that; it looked like a kaiseki restaurant, one that specialised in multiple small dishes of fancy, elegantly presented food. It was the sort of cuisine that the clan would have felt at home with for some of the more formal events that I only vaguely remembered, and I doubted a rumour about supply problems would be as effective against it if I needed to take it down again.

I hold grudges. It’s a thing. If you want a story with a _good_ main character, find one that focusses on Naruto.

“No,” Sakura said, coming up next to us with a grimace. “It’s Akimichi again.”

Oh, well, that was a relief. Stop looking unhappy, Sakura. We like Akimichis. The only downside was that they were probably fair enough to buy the sushi place at a decent price after it went bust instead of forcing old lady whatever-her-name-was into bankruptcy, but. Can’t have everything in life.

“They might still sell sushi?” Naruto offered, also picking up her expression. “Or I bet there’s another sushi place somewhere.”

“No, it’s not that. It’s just… The Akimichi have loads of restaurants.”

I blinked. “Yes? They make good food.”

“Yeah, but. The chefs are Akimichi as well.”

I shared a look with Naruto. He didn’t seem to get it either. “They make good food?” I tried again, fairly certain I was missing something. Had she liked old lady sushi face? I get that she probably hadn’t known beforehand how much of a bad person she was, but surely it was obvious after she’d literally refused to serve Naruto?

She flicked her gaze back at us, noted our lack of comprehension, and shook her head. “No, you’re right. They do make good food, and the restaurant’s in a good place. If we deliver these I think there’s only one more run and we can finish early.”

Saying that, she held up her bag of groceries, then turned and ran along the rooftops in the direction of the client’s house. Naruto and I hesitated, then fell in behind her.

“Don’t ask me,” I muttered in response to Naruto’s questioning look. “I _like_ Chouji.”

“Yeah, but so does Sakura-chan,” he pointed out. Which was true. She did. Because Chouji was good people, and by extension so were his clan. But disliking Akimichi hadn’t seemed like the problem, so… So?

I shook my head. If it came up again I’d press her for answers, but it was just a restaurant.

We did finish early, exactly as Sakura had predicted, and she peeled off to spend the extra time with her parents. I frowned after her, not sure if this was a normal spend-time-with-parents or a continuation of her odd mood. She’d been happy to see Ino, hadn’t she? And the morning exercise had gone well. Maybe I was reading too much into it; it’d been a while since I’d had family, and even as old-me I’d moved out and only saw mine when I visited. Expecting her to spend every moment with us when she was the only one on the team still with parents was probably a bit much.

“We could spar?” Naruto offered, stretching as we cut through one of the parks. I hummed noncommittally; sparring was fine, I liked sparring, but there were other things to life as well. “Not spar then,” he said. “We could -”

“Get him!”

My sharingan flared to life automatically even as I tilted my head forward to hide it with my hair, and I pushed myself in front of Naruto with shuriken already in my hand and ready to fly. I hadn’t been on guard which was stupid; being in Konoha didn’t stop us being attacked, whether it was idiots after Naruto for being a jinchuuriki or -

My sharingan picked up enough of the hand seal the little kids were making for me to be able to predict the rest, and I desperately turned it off and slammed my eyes shut.

“Team Konohamaru style: Sexy no Jutsu!”

“Oh my _god_ ,” I said, pressing my hands against my eyes and taking a step back. “Naruto you fuckwad. _Why_.”

“Hey boss~” someone, I kid you not, _moaned_ , and I flinched. I couldn’t cover my ears if my hands were over my eyes. This was _not ok._ “You haven’t played with us _forever_ boss. Don’t you like us anymore?”

_This was so far beyond not ok_.

There was the familiar sound of someone’s fist meeting someone’s head, then: “Don’t use that on the bastard, idiots!”

“Why?” another voice asked, low and feminine and husky. I attempted to rectify the ear situation with my elbows, because I refused to uncover my eyes. The sharingan was activated by strong emotion and panic, I didn’t trust it. I didn’t like seeing _me_ naked, there was no way in hell I was risking searing a bunch of _toddlers_ doing sexy jutsu into my brain for the rest of eternity. “Is he a pervert?”

“That’s the whole point though. It works best on perverts.”

“Yeah, but then why -”

_Thwap._ “The bastard’s not a pervert! Change back. _All_ of you. And be stealthier! I heard you coming from ages away!”

I was using my kawarimi sense now to very carefully feel out the ground behind me so I could keep walking backwards. Frustratingly, I couldn’t actually switch without seeing where I was switching to, though just then I was willing to give it a shot and to hell with the consequences.

_Why_ had Naruto taught his stupid technique to a bunch of mini people. I thought it was only meant to be Konohamaru. Fucking _christ_ did no one in this damn village realise that kids were kids and not adults with smaller shoe sizes.

A tug on my arm stopped me. “You can look, bastard.”

“Yeah, we’re us again!”

“Sorry for scaring you, neechan!”

I cautiously lowered my arms and unscrewed my eyes, double checking for sharingan before I fully opened them. The three members of what had to be Konohamaru’s team stared back, wide eyed and apologetic, and I wondered if I’d missed something while I was backing away.

“He’s not a neechan,” one of the boys said. Udon? That sounded like what I remembered, but was he really named after noodles? Mind you. Naruto was a ramen topping. Konohamaru, Udon… Mochi?

“Well he’s not a pervert,” the girl who may or may not be called Mochi pointed out. “And if the boss is niisan then I want a neechan.”

“That’s not how it works!” Konohamaru, that one had to be Konohamaru. He had the scarf. “Girls can be perverts too. And anyway, you can’t make him a girl because he acts like one.”

“Naruto,” I hissed between my teeth. “What the hell is happening.”

“Ah, yeah,” he said, scrubbing a hand over the back of his neck. He looked down at Konohamaru, then straightened into what was almost one of his inspirational poses. “Right! Bastard, this is Konohamaru, and Udon, and Moegi. Sometimes I play ninja with them. But only sometimes, when I don’t have important grown up ninja stuff, believe it!” That last bit was said with a pointed glare that went completely over all three of their heads, because none of them were actually looking at him.

“Is your name really Bastard?” Moegi asked. Moegi, Mochi, I was close. So was she, and I forced myself to hold still and not back up another step. I might have got used to parking Inari with Bull and listening to him explain economics to me with half an ear while I trained, but I wasn’t actually any better with kids.

“It’s Sasuke,” I said. “Go home.”

“Sasuke-nee,” she repeated consideringly.

“Sasuke- _nii_ ,” Konohamaru corrected.

“Please go home,” I tried, because they didn’t seem to have heard the first time.

“Yeah,” Naruto cut in, stepping up next to me with his arms folded. “We can’t play with you all the time. We’re busy!”

They slumped as one. “But boss,” Konohamaru whined. “You _never_ play with us anymore. And we learnt the sexy jutsu an’ everything, you said you’d teach us more cool things.”

Naruto wavered, glancing back at me unsurely. He clearly wanted to play with them, and if I wasn’t there I had no doubt that he would’ve done. I hesitated. I knew what it was like to be a younger brother who’s aniki never had time to play with you. I was also, apparently, a pushover.

“I’ll see you later,” I said. I needed to look for pond flowers anyway, there was still an hour till the shops would be closed. It didn’t seem like the sort of the thing that would be readily in stock, but at least I could talk to one of the Yamanakas about ordering something. So long as Ino wasn’t there. If she was, my pond was fine, and I’d find some other way to make it colourful.

“You’re not staying?” Udon asked as I picked my way between them and started along the path. I shook my head; Naruto seemed torn, but it would be good for him to spend time with them, and they were already moving closer to him as I left, clamouring for him to play.

“If Sasuke-nee’s not here, will you teach us the harem no jutsu?”

I turned on my heel. “Gremlins,” I said firmly, channeling Pakkun. “Sit.” It was a wide path. Not many people came this way through the park. If they didn’t like us blocking it, they could go somewhere else.

They sat. So did Naruto, and I faltered at their attention. My eyes caught on Moegi, who was _miniscule_ and apparently wanted to learn a harem technique, and I firmed my resolve and dropped into a cross legged position across from them.

Not that a firm resolve gave me any idea how to _explain_ that their social conditioning was fucked up and their society’s gender imbalance was wrong, but. _But_. Surely if I just opened my mouth and winged it, I’d work it out.

“You can’t turn yourself into naked people. It’s not good. You’re tiny.” Not like that. Fuck. If I opened my mouth again could I salvage it? “So. Don’t do it.” No. No I could not.

They all - including Naruto - scrunched their noses up in protest. If I were a lesser human being, I would have fled by now. Maybe if I were smarter as well.

“But it’s useful,” Udon said. “It’s a pervert knock-out technique that allows you to win against a stronger opponent. Why wouldn’t we use it?”

“Because. It. Look, you know _why_ it works against perverts, right?” They shook their heads. The younger three, that is - thank God that Naruto at least knew what he was doing. To an extent. He was still _twelve_. His knowledge though didn’t help me with the others, and my mind baulked at the idea of giving The Talk to a bunch of proto-people. Didn’t they have parents? The fuck were their parents _doing_ letting them run around using jutsu like this?

“Ok. Right.” Why. _Why_. Fuckit. “Is it ok to spy on girls at the onsen?”

“No!” Moegi said immediately, face creasing into a scowl. Konohamaru and Naruto looked guilty. I did _not_ want to know.

“Right! Because even if it doesn’t _physically_ hurt someone, you’ve taken something they didn’t want to give you, and that’s bad. Because… it means that even when they aren’t in the bath, they don’t know who’s seen them naked or what people might be thinking when they look at them. And. It’s dangerous. It makes people think that girls are only there to be naked, and forget that girls can punch people and run companies and be ninja.”

Shit. This was the _least_ coherent explanation I had ever given in my _life_. How many times could you say ‘naked’ before it lost all meaning? If it wouldn’t have undermined my argument so much, I’d probably have cried at how much I was botching this, but I didn’t because it was important and even if Konoha didn’t care, I did.

“But it’s a technique,” Konohamaru pointed out, squinting. “We’re not actually naked. Or girls.” He slid an apologetic glance to Moegi for that last bit, so at least he got a point for that. Half point. Maybe. Rounded down because I wasn't feeling generous.

“And even if we were,” Naruto picked up, “Loads of girls are sexy or almost naked.”

Anko? Most kunoichi actually tended to be practical rather than revealing if they were in mission gear, unless they were deliberately going for a style. Not that short shorts or all-mesh tops _couldn't_ be practical, but the difference was fairly obvious. Or… hell, where had he learnt sexy no jutsu from in the first place?

“They can choose to be,” I said, fighting to stay on track. “And that’s fine, it’s their choice and they understand what they’re doing. But if you don’t know _why_ it works on perverts, then you’re too young to understand. And. If you don’t understand, you can’t choose. So. Don’t do it.”

There was a pause. God, let that be the end of it. _Please_.

“So what you’re saying,” Udon said, raising a hand to his chin in a classic thinking pose. “Is that it’s dangerous to use a technique without knowing what it does. If we want to use sexy no jutsu, we need to learn how perverts think.”

What. No.

“My sensei’s a pervert,” Konohamaru offered, leaning forward eagerly. “So’s my grandpa, but sensei has to teach us if we ask him.”

_No._

“Yeah!” Moegi cheered, pushing herself to her feet in preparation to go. “And if we know how it works, we can make it better, and next time we’ll get boss-niisan for sure!”

“You can’t get me with my own technique!” Naruto yelled after her. “And you can’t use it when the bastard’s around either!”

“Sorry Sasuke-nee, we won’t!”

“Sasuke- _nii_ Moegi, it’s Sasuke- _nii_.”

I blinked after their retreating backs. That. Had not gone well. That went terribly. Oh god. I really, really hoped Ebisu handled them better than I did. I leant forward, still sitting cross legged, until I could drop my forehead on the path and curse the fact that I was water natured. Just think, if I was earth like Sakura I could literally get the ground to swallow me.

“Bastard?”

I made a whimpering sound of protest and refused to look up. He paused, then asked, “Is it all sexy jutsu? Or just when it’s naked?”

“You really want me to answer that after the mess I just made?”

“You didn’t make a mess,” he defended, which was sweet of him but entirely untrue. “I thought you didn’t mind it though. I mean, if I kept my jimjams on and everything.”

There was a piece of gravel digging into my left eyebrow. I wondered if it would leave a mark. “I don’t,” I said, feeling suddenly exhausted by the whole thing. And out of place. Konoha wasn’t where I belonged, and it’s morals were not my morals. It was just. Wrong. “They’re _kids_ ,” I said plaintively into the floor. They were all kids. Naruto was a kid. Canon Sasuke had been a kid. As far as Konoha should be concerned, I still was.

And, to prove how much of a kid he was, Naruto fidgeted and didn’t seem to know what to say to that, so went for the most obvious and blatant subject change I’d ever seen.

“Do you want ice cream? We could see if the new restaurant place did ice cream. Or old man Teuchi might have some. Sometimes Ayame-neechan makes mochi.”

I gave myself another second, then reluctantly pushed myself back into a sitting position. “Yeah. Ice cream. Sounds great.”

After that, it was another couple of days until I could persuade Naruto that if he left me alone for an evening I would manage to survive unscathed till the following morning. The fact that I’d achieved this for, what, five and a half years by myself - plus the half decade I’d spent living in my own house in a past life where I was _actually a whole entire adult_ \- seemed very minor and insignificant when compared with his burning need for me to know that I didn’t have to be lonely, but. We got there.

I couldn’t even be as annoyed as I wanted to be, given how earnest he was and how much I usually appreciated him being there. He’d even tried to rope in Sakura, though thankfully she’d just raised a questioning eyebrow and taken it in stride when I rolled my eyes and pulled a face.

It was one night. _One night._ I didn’t need mother henning, however used I’d got to sharing my kitchen with Naruto.

“Honestly, Plushie-tan,” I complained. “I know I’ve got issues but I’m not actually made of paper. What do they think I’m going to do, convince myself I can’t trust them and run away forever without giving them chance to explain?” I paused, then resumed towelling my hair dry. “Besides, I haven’t got issues. I have quirks. Every ninja has quirks. They’re under control. I’m fine. Wow, that’s a lot of static.”

I poked the fluffy mess, frowning dubiously at the mirror. This was why I didn’t usually towel it, but it was also potentially getting a bit long. A problem for another time though; I had work to do while I had the house to myself, and I dropped the towel over Plushie-tan while I changed into my pyjamas and pulled my jacket over them with brisk efficiency. My mum’s pins were in the jacket pocket, and I stared at the little red flowers for a second before pulling the most unruly pieces of hair back and fixing them out my face. It wasn’t the neatest, but. It was practical. That was all.

“I won’t be long,” I said, letting myself out the back door and shifting almost into mission mode. The window to the study was exactly as I’d left it, and I let myself in silently and covered it with the screen again before I turned on the light. The precautions probably weren’t necessary but they felt right, even if it was paranoid to be sneaking around in my own house.

I was, after all, in the Uchiha district. It was off limits to the rest of the village. Other than Naruto, I wasn’t sure if anyone else had been here since the funerals.

Still, I went through each of Fugaku’s papers as quickly and methodically as I could, scanning each one with my sharingan open and memorising it rather than read everything there. I couldn’t open everything - there were still a couple of seals I didn’t know how to get past, and taking the back off the drawers didn’t give me much - but I found enough to start painting a picture.

When the last one was done I put everything back exactly as I’d left it and wiped down the dust to hide where I had and hadn’t been. A quick search of the room gave me nothing but a safe, protected by too many seals for me to hope to break into. I left it, dropping soundlessly out the window and padding round the outside of the house to slip into Itachi’s room, mind too unsettled to want to go back to the kitchen just yet. Plushie-tan was in the kitchen. So was Naruto, most nights, even if he wasn't now. Itachi’s room was a quieter place to think.

There were a lot of things to think about. By themselves they were dry, inconsequential things. Supplier contracts. Housing disputes. Loan repayment schedules. Annual budgets. Even with the sharingan off my head felt overfull of numbers and legalese, and I sat cross legged on Itachi’s bed with my eyes shut as I attempted to file the mass of new information into something useful.

Taken together though…

It was unsettling. I’d known that the clan were planning a coup and that Itachi had killed them for it, but I’d never looked much further than that. Itachi was my brother, I loved him, he loved me; if he’d disagreed with the clan then the clan must’ve been wrong. Yes, Obito was behind the rumours that we were to blame for the kyuubi attack, and yes, Danzo was stirring the pot to further his eyeball hoarding ambitions, but. Ultimately. The Uchiha were bad. Madara, Obito, even canon Sasuke - the Uchiha were the antagonists in the story. Except for Itachi. Itachi was good. It was just… the way things were.

But what I read painted a different picture. The dislike we’d faced as a clan was older than Obito, maybe as old as the founding and the original grudges between us and the Senju that were made worse when Madara left. The first two Hokages were Senju, after all, and it was no secret that Tobirama didn’t trust us. Maybe Danzo and the Sandaime had come by their dislike of us honestly, maybe they’d inherited from him, who knew.

Whatever the reason, we were struggling. Financially, economically; even our famous eyes were working against us, and we were frequently targeted on missions and had a higher death rate because of it - _particularly_ after Kakashi unwittingly proved that they could be transplanted. At least, that was the official explanation Fugaku could find for the fact that the clan was smaller than it should be, but from the way he was still investigating it I don’t think he was convinced. Maybe it was Danzo. Maybe someone else wanted our eyes. Maybe it was just bad luck. If he’d found out by the time he’d died, he hadn’t written it down. I don’t know if he went to the village for help - with the disappearances, or with the fact that we were approaching bankruptcy in a village that actively undermined any business ventures we tried to start. I doubt he’d’ve got it if he did. 

Maybe the coup _was_ a power grab. We were still Uchiha, being proud and angry and fighting too hard for the people we loved was practically in our DNA. But... maybe it was also a last resort.

I unfolded myself from my hunched position and went to the false-bottomed compartment at the back of Itachi’s wardrobe. There was a box there, one I’d found a few years ago, filled with neatly folded ANBU gear. I’d taken one of the sets of gloves to repurpose into arm protectors, but the rest was still there. White chest plate. Black clothes. Sword.

Stylised weasel mask.

Itachi had been spying on the clan for at least a year before he betrayed us. He would’ve known everything I was slowly piecing together, and he’d made the decision that we were wrong. And then he’d killed us for it. Except he hadn’t killed me, because he loved me.

“But what if I was part of it?” I asked the mask. I’d been too young, I hadn’t known - clan philosophy said the village was jealous of us, taught us to write off any odd behaviour as people feeling inferior, and people had gone to great lengths to refuse to admit that our lives were unsustainable. It hadn’t seemed strange to me how much we were set apart.

Would I have joined the coup though, if I did know? Instinctively, I wanted to say no. Of course not. The coup was bad, and I wasn’t _good_ but I wasn’t _treasonous._ Much. But on the other hand, I could see why the clan thought it was the only action.

I tilted the mask to catch the light. ANBU didn’t have names, or faces, or brothers. When he wore it, he was a tool of the village, loyal to his Hokage above everyone. If I _had_ been part of the coup… Would he still have saved me? Would he still have loved me, if I disagreed with him? Or would I have been just another enemy to be cut down and cleaned out? Like my mum. Our mum. My hand rose of its own volition to the flower pins, and when I noticed I balled it into a fist and dropped it.

“Don’t be stupid,” I said. “That’s not how love works. It’s not how _masks_ work.” I put the weasel back in its box with unnecessary force, then for added measure tugged out the pins and and dropped both of them in too, sliding the whole thing back into its hiding spot and closing the wardrobe on it. “The clan’s dead. It’s done. It doesn’t matter anymore.”

I climbed back out the window and retreated to the kitchen, laying out my futon with agitated movements that sent Plushie-tan sprawling on the floor. There was no point trying to work out if I’d’ve supported the coup or not. I didn’t. I was seven. And even if I had, Itachi was still my brother, he still loved me. He wouldn’t hurt me. That was a fact, you didn’t change facts by second guessing them. There was no _point._

I retrieved Plushie-tan and buried myself defensively in my blankets, willing myself to sleep with an angry refusal to accept being awake. I didn’t think about Itachi. Or the coup. It was stupid. I thought about the massacre instead, holding on to the fact that I survived, and that, in a roundabout way, my brother did it all for me.

Because, the sly thought that I couldn’t quite suppress said, if Konoha was wrong but Itachi was also wrong, there’d be nowhere left for me to go.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Shikamaru: the fuck is he doing now  
> Shikamaru: Naruto does your teammate have _any idea_ what stealth means  
> Shikamaru: why is he the way he is  
> Naruto: ... no, he's actually really good at stealth, he just doesn't follow orders very well. It's kinda a thing.  
> Naruto: can I go and join him?  
> Shikamaru: _is Sakura using chain saws in a friendly spar_
> 
> People have been asking for a Team Ten / Shikamaru point of view since, I think, chapter three? Ta daa *jazz hands*


	19. Chapter 19

“You didn’t sleep,” Naruto accused me the next morning.

“I’m fine,” I said, shrugging him off. He made a sound like an irritated tea kettle and crossed his arms.

“That’s bastard talk for _everything’s shit and I need help but I’m too stubborn to admit it._ ”

Well, yeah, but he didn't need to call me out on it. Also no it wasn't. It was fine. Ninja were meant to be able to run on no sleep, it was a skill. “Sakura,” I said, turning to her in an attempt to deflect. “Naruto’s swearing again.”

“Because I knew I shouldn’t have left you alone last night!”

“You do look a bit tired, Sasuke-kun,” she said, tilting her head apologetically. I huffed at both of them, abandoning my stretches and stalking off to the training field.

“I don’t need a bedtime,” I said over my shoulder. “I also don’t need a babysitter. Are we going to spar or what?”

“Wonky puppy!” Naruto yelled. Rude. I gave him a two fingered salute and resolved to set Pakkun on fire next time I saw him. I then paused, considered that potentially I might not be the most well rested and cheerful I'd ever been, and amended my statement. _Kakashi_ , I'd set Kakashi on fire next time I saw him.

The benefit, see, of being an Uchiha and being force-taught the grand fireball jutsu despite having a water affinity was that I was very familiar with what things looked like when they were burning. Though, was I water back then? That was before the massacre when I was just Sasuke-me and hadn’t drowned. Huh. I forgot old-me used to be a separate person. Anyway, persuading my chakra to be fire took too long to use in battle, but convincing it to be _yin_ took practically no time at all and the more details you could add to your illusions, the more convincing they would be.

In other words: my fire genjutsus were very effective. Add in that time I’d spent experimenting with the immolation jutsu to tone it down for a keep-warm jutsu and hadn’t quite got it right… Yeah. _Very_ effective.

Our usual pattern for the morning was to spar early then break apart and focus on less intensive training until Kakashi arrived. It gave us a bit of time to recover before going on missions, in theory so we could leap into action at a moment’s notice instead of being collapsed on the floor after beating the shit out of our teammates - but these were d-ranks. We were more concerned with not scaring the clients by showing up sweaty and still bleeding. Covered in half an exploded tree. Or, if Naruto had been experimenting with turning his wind jutsu into an actual attack instead of just a deflective defence, with really bad hair. _Really_ bad hair. It was already fluffy from being manhandled in a towel last night, this wasn’t fair.

“Fix it,” I said, flopping back on the grass. “I look like Kakashi. _Fix._ ”

“I didn’t know it was going to be that strong,” he said, sitting down next to me and doing nothing to hide his grin. “You kind of do look like Sensei though. Maybe you should keep it. It’s out of your face, at least.”

I wrinkled my nose and glared at him.

“Sheesh Hime-chan, calm. I’m fixing. Do you want a brush or a comb?”

“Comb,” I said, holding my hand out imperiously. A small puff of bunshin smoke, and by the power of the god-mod henge, I had a bright orange comb in my hand. Have I mentioned yet that I love the god-mod henge? Because I love the god-mod henge.

“I wonder if that’s why Sensei’s hair is like that though,” Sakura said, dropping down opposite and fiddling with something on her gloves. “Maybe he does it on purpose so it stands up and stays out the way.”

I made a noise of disagreement. “No amount of backcombing would create that shambles. It takes years of dedicated neglect to achieve so many split ends. _Ow._ Or maybe he just got Naruto to dry his hair in a tornado.”

“Here,” Naruto said, tugging the comb out of my hand. “You’re going to break it.”

“What kind of weak-ass comb did you give me?”

“Your hair, bastard. Stop fidgeting.” I did, reluctantly, though I didn’t untense at first. I trusted Naruto, I was just not in the mood to have someone that close when I couldn't see them - even when we shared a futon I tended to sleep facing him and with as much space between us as possible. Not that _as much as possible_ tended to be a _lot_ given how much he wriggled, but. It was common sense. I mean, I trusted Itachi more than anyone on the planet, and he still stabbed me.

It was _Naruto_ though, so I forced myself to relax; he wasn’t the stabby sort. Plus, there was something universally comforting about having someone else do your hair, and he was careful not to pull. It was nice, even, and I’d been on edge about the clan since last night; putting my thoughts aside and concentrating instead on tilting my head while he sorted out the tangles was something of a relief. Repetitive motions and warm people were good things, I didn't make the rules.

“Maybe you should tie it up?” Sakura suggested, adjusting something in one of the seals carved into the leather. “At least until Naruto’s got his wind jutsus under control.” She clenched her fist and grinned in delight as her knuckle spikes flashed out and retracted in a sudden, rapid motion.

I hummed, verging on sleepy. “It’s not long enough to -”

“Oh my _god_ you sit around doing each other’s _hair?”_

I sprung into a startled crouch, sacrificing a tangle in favour of getting a handful of shuriken out in a defensive formation. Sakura, I noticed, had also reacted, activating the chainsaw blades on her arms though she hadn’t yet set them spinning.

“Morning, Ino-chan!” Naruto said, waving with an easy grin. He hadn’t even moved. He did give me a reproachful look before dispelling the comb, but frankly I had more important things to worry about than a bad hair day. Kakashi’d said we’d be working with Team Ten more, but I hadn’t thought he meant _now._ We weren’t even at their training ground.

“Morning,” she returned, giving him a distracted wave back before turning on Sakura. “You didn’t tell me about the hair. That’s cheating.”

“All’s fair, Ino-pig,” Sakura said smugly, and made a show of flicking her own braid over her shoulder. Ino’s eyes caught on it curiously before they widened in comprehension, and I cut in before any more embarrassing bonding moments could come to light.

“Yamanaka. Why are you here.”

“Asuma-sensei said to meet here today,” she said, and started a basic warm up routine like she had every right to be there. Which she didn’t. No, I had not yet put my shuriken away. “Is this your training ground? Do you always arrive this early? I thought your sensei was usually late.”

“Nah, Kakashi-dick-sensei won’t be here for at least a couple of hours,” Naruto said. “We’re just training. Hey, are Chouji and Shikamaru coming? Are we doing more practice missions?”

Ino had paused mid stretch, looking between the three of us with an expression I couldn’t place. “They’ll be here later,” she said. “You… always turn up early for extra training? All three of you?”

“Yes?” Sakura answered, frowning. “We meet at half six, it’s not that early.”

“Half _six_ ,” she repeated. “Forehead, let me train with you. I gave you a ribbon, you owe me.”

“What,” I said, confused and still trying to understand her expression. “What? You have a team. Hands off.”

She made a frustrated sound and put her hands on her hips, scarily close to mimicking one of Naruto’s inspirational poses except with more pout. “Shikamaru’s a lazy bum and Chouji does what Shikamaru tells him,” she complained. “Getting either of them to do anything is a nightmare. Sakura, please. You wouldn’t leave your rival with no one to spar against, that’s totally an unfair advantage.”

Oh. She was jealous. She’d been the top kunoichi at the academy, hadn’t she? And based on the practice mission from a few days ago her skills hadn’t slipped, but they hadn’t advanced much either. I relaxed slightly, happier now I’d worked it out, but when Sakura flicked her gaze over to the two of us I was torn.

On the one hand, I didn’t want to share. Team Seven were my team, training ground three was my training ground, and it was annoying enough that our senseis had decided to push our teams together in the first place. I’d been working on a dark-eyes genjutsu I could drop over my sharingan to disguise it, but it was impossible to hide all your skills from someone you trained with, and a large part of me still rebelled at Team Ten knowing what our weaknesses were. Plus, Ino was loud, and it’d taken me three months just to get used to Naruto and Sakura. Adding _more_ to the list of people I was expected to care about would be exhausting.

No, hold up. What. No. Training did not equal caring. What the fuck. _Tolerate._ More people to tolerate, because I didn’t care - I mean, maybe about Naruto and Sakura, but that was hardly a fair comparison. I accepted that my teammates were good people, I appreciated Bull for being big and warm and soft, and I didn't want to set Pakkun on fire even in genjutsu format. That was it. Because I was independent. Self contained. I put my eyeballs first and my brother second and other than that I was a free-spirited wanderer who wasn’t tied down by anything except proximity to a working shower. It wouldn’t bother me in the _slightest_ for Ino to join us. We could bitch about Shikamaru together. It’d be great. No caring. Just bitching.

Decision made, I set my jaw and nodded at Sakura. If my nod was a bit more combative than it might have been, well, screw it. I was a determined and serious individual. It fit my aesthetic.

She quirked her lips in a smile of amusement and I scowled. For the _aesthetic_ , damnit.

“Yeah, believe it!” Naruto cheered. “We can spar two on two, or three on one, or all four of us together!”

“Girls against boys,” Sakura suggested. “You’re going _down._ ”

“ _Yes,_ ” Ino said, eyes bright. “Why are you still sitting down? Come on, don’t keep a lady waiting!”

“No lady,” I protested. “Casual sexism is still sexism.”

She hesitated, and Sakura rolled her eyes. “He’s got a thing about people treating kunoichi differently,” she explained. “Just act like men and women are the same, he’ll be fine.”

“They are the same. Gender is bullshit.” As someone who’d been both a girl, a boy, and a confused-but-probably-girl mix of the two, I felt uniquely qualified to decide this for the universe. Or, not uniquely; Haku was also allowed a say. Maybe Naruto, given that he seemed as comfortable in sexy no jutsu as in his normal form, though he'd not used it much recently.

Which reminded me: “And no more flirting. You’ll make Sakura pick up bad habits again.”

“Any other ground rules?” Ino asked dryly. “I thought Sakura was team captain.”

“Sakura’s rule is you have to listen to what the bastard says,” Naruto recited. “Unless he’s being an idiot, in which case ignore him and don’t let him run off by himself.”

I frowned in objection, but Sakura just nodded with sage agreement. “Exactly,” she said. “Boys, up. You get two minutes head start then we’re going to destroy you.”

“C-rank,” Asuma said smugly, leading us to the mission office. I hesitated, flicking a look back at Kakashi for assurance. We weren’t due another c-rank, I didn’t think? Canon went straight from Wave to the chunin exams. Didn’t it?

I shook myself out of that mindset. Canon hadn’t predicted working with Team Ten. Hell, canon hadn’t predicted most of Wave, except in the general sense of _Haku and Zabuza are there, Tazuna builds a bridge._ Canon was about as safe to rely on as my vague plan to outrun Orochimaru in the forest of death.

I really needed to work on that.

Kakashi tilted his head without lifting it from his obligatory orange book, so I assumed he was agreeing with Asuma. So did Naruto, who practically skipped in his excitement. “C-rank? Seriously? What, all six of us? It must be a huge mission, believe it!”

“Probably guard duty,” Shikamaru said. “Big teams are usually hired to cover multiple shifts.”

“Or multiple opponents,” Sakura added. Shikamaru hummed unhappily in disagreement.

“We’re not combat specialists,” he said. “Your team might be, but it doesn’t make sense for mine.”

Combat specialists? Excuse you? Sakura might be and Naruto's skills had many uses, but I was a stealth specialist. Stealth, genjutsu, precision weaponry - hell, I was more suited to undercover work and assassination than combat.

I froze for a beat before I kept walking, putting Itachi’s ANBU mask firmly out of mind. ANBU might be assassins, but they were also the elite. Kakashi didn’t even want me to be chunin yet, he wouldn’t be training me for that. And if he was, he’d be disappointed. I wasn’t that loyal. Not to the Hokage.

I cast about for something else to focus on.

Two genin teams, both stuffed with clan heirs, both needing to be available for the chunin exams that had to be less than a week away by now. They wouldn’t send us far from the village. Nor would they send us on a high risk mission; they needed us to impress the other kage with. That’s what the chunin exams were, after all - a whole load of posturing and politics, wrapped up in a bread and circuses style entertainment.

Oh. Politics. “Dealing with foreign nin is automatically a c-rank, isn’t it?”

“Clever,” Asuma praised. “All three of you. Shikamaru’s right though Sakura, genin teams aren’t usually sent into heavy combat. We do at least try to keep you alive until you’re promoted.”

The joke fell flat, at least to Team Seven, and I scowled and edged a step closer to Kakashi. He was a cryptic asshole and a mostly absent sensei - at least, these days he was - but he was our cryptic asshole and I didn’t appreciate other people poking at his insecurities. I doubted Asuma did it on purpose; the tiny detail of me kawariming directly into the line of Kakashi’s chidori and almost making him relive one of the worst moments of his life had never made it to any official reports. Or unofficial ones, unless Kakashi had told Obito at the memorial stone.

Still though. I didn’t like Asuma. He slipped too easily into a commander role, taking charge of both teams while Kakashi sloped along behind with his book. He praised too easily - it wasn’t clever to remember how mission ranks worked. It was basic knowledge. And his rules were too soft. He shouldn’t let Shikamaru and Chouji be lazy about training, and he shouldn’t have missed that Ino wanted to do more.

I ignored the fact that Kakashi’s approach to our training was similarly lax and it was more our own work ethic that made us continue to spar in the mornings. Kakashi was a disaster of a human being who’d been raised by Pakkun. Asuma looked like a functioning adult. The standards were different.

I also ignored both the considering look Shikamaru shot at me and the hand Kakashi dropped on my head to ruffle my hair. Or to attempt to ruffle it, at least.

“Maa, were you running late this morning?” He asked, detangling his fingers from the windblown mess.

“I’m finally following your teachings,” I shot back, ducking away and trying to flatten down the fluff. “Next I’ll get a mask and an eyepatch. Maybe start sleeping on Bull so I smell of dog.”

“You can’t be Sensei, bastard,” Naruto said. “You don’t like porn. It’s his defining feature.”

“The bounty books tend to focus on my sharingan,” Kakashi protested. “I think one of them claimed I’d copied a thousand jutsu.”

“Icha Icha no Kakashi.”

“So mean to your sensei. So cold. So very uncute.”

In the end, both Shikamaru and I were right - it was guard duty, and it was dealing with foreign nin. Specifically, the other entrants for the chunin exams, who were being housed at various strategic points around the village in what I can only assume was dedicated diplomatic housing. They were chosen to keep the foreigners away from any of the important workings of the village without being insulting obvious about the fact that we didn’t trust them not to snoop (the distrust wasn’t insulting, that was a given, but the amount of effort each side put into the pretending was important), and we were being stationed around each area to make sure no one strayed where they weren’t meant to.

I’m sorry, no; to represent our village as guides and welcoming presences, showing off the best of the Will of Fire and making sure our guests were comfortably settled.

But also to make sure they stayed put.

As genin, we were put with Sand, the village that was nominally our ally. Outright enemies like Lightning and Rock hadn’t sent any teams, and those that the village was more wary of were being looked after by chunin, but as a show of faith - and a subtle brag about the superiority of our genins - Sand was left with us.

Given that Sand were preparing to turn around and shiv us all while we were caught in a giant sleep genjutsu then set a bijuu loose on us, this didn’t seem like the best of plans.

“What the hell am I supposed to do,” I mumbled, leaning back against the wall and allowing myself a moment of dejected slump. We were spaced out enough that no one else was in hearing distance, though if I extended my chakra far enough I could feel someone the right size and shape to be Chouji not too far away.

Also a cat. I looked over, raising an eyebrow at it as it crouched by the base of the wall. A familiar cat, I noticed, very fluffy, very upholstered, very obviously midway through another daring escape from the Daimyo’s wife.

“No,” I said, adding water to my chakra for solidity and gently pushing Tora back with it. “You’re not meant to go in.”

She mewed in sharp protest and took a step to the left, then crouched again.

“No,” I repeated. “You look like Tora but you might be a summon. Or be carrying secret messages.” Another mew, this one louder, but my chakra was impassable. Well, not really, but Tora was small and clearly confused by feeling pressure from something she couldn’t see, so the outcome was the same. She sat down and favoured me with an incredibly unimpressed stare.

I shrugged unapologetically. “Mission rules. Suck it up, I’m not breaking them.”

She held the stare for another long pause, then blinked, looking away and resettling herself more comfortably on the floor. Always the plan, of course. Wall? Boring. She never wanted to go up the wall in the first place. Don’t be ridiculous. Why would she want a wall when there was a perfectly good floor?

I flashed an amused smirk at her, then turned back to the problem of the invasion. My amusement died. If Sand were already here, the chunin exams were starting in the next few days. Orochimaru would enter the Forest of Death as… a Grass nin? Either that or Sound, but I was pretty sure it was Grass. A day for the written exam, then five days for the forest and one day for the preliminary matches after that - that was a week. After that, it was a month break, then Orochimaru switched to impersonating the Kazekage in time for the final matches. Did they take place over several days? I couldn’t remember. I think they were meant to, but Gaara released Shukaku during the first round of matches.

And once he did: death, mayhem, exit Hokage and a lot of other people. I didn’t know the specifics, but Konoha was meant to be in pretty bad shape afterwards.

I chewed my lip. My first priority was not to get sealed. Canon-Sasuke was messed up to start with, but it wasn’t until after he got the curse seal that he went completely off the rails. I couldn’t remember if it messed with people’s heads or just with their chakra, but either way, no. Did not want.

Not that turning on Konoha really counted as going off the rails, but attacking Naruto? No. Boy was majorly out of line.

My second priority was not to get anyone killed fighting Orochimaru. Team Ten were a difficulty. Without Orochimaru, it would be logical to run the forest together so we could watch out for each other, and splitting up felt instinctively bad in a way I wanted to shy away from. They survived fine in canon, but as previously discussed, fuck canon. Sand was definitely stacking their ‘genin’ teams with chunin or higher level ninja, it was how they were sneaking them into the village for the invasion. I wouldn’t be surprised if Sound had done the same, and by Shikamaru’s own admission, Team Ten weren’t as combat orientated as we were.

Even if I was still a stealth specialist, thank you. Sneak attacks were a valid battle technique.

But if they stayed with us and Orochimaru attacked… But if they weren’t with us, was I risking Sakura and Naruto by depriving them of backup? And if I somehow _did_ survive the forest, that looped back to the problem I hadn’t been able to solve last time - Orochimaru would still be out there. I wouldn’t know when he’d attack or where he’d be, not until the invasion came round and I could pin him down to being the Kazekage. And how the fuck was I meant to stop the invasion? I didn’t care about the Sandaime dying, but even I wasn’t harsh enough to write everyone else off as an unfortunate footnote.

Also, Naruto did care. The Sandaime was a clan-murdering weak-willed Uchiha hater who let Danzo and the council walk all over him, but Naruto would be sad if he died. If he were in my position, he’d find a way to save everyone, Hokage included. If he knew _I_ was in my position, he’d trust me to at least try.

“Come on,” I said, dropping my head forward. “That’s way too much pressure. I can’t - I’m a genin. The fuck does he expect me to do, pull a mangekyou out my ass?”

Tora _prrped_ in question, stretching towards me with a lazy yawn. “I know,” I said. “It’s ridiculous.”

I couldn’t stop the invasion. I probably, if I was honest, couldn’t stop Orochimaru. If I let him seal me, I could gamble that he’d leave the others alive like he did before, but that firstly wasn’t an option and secondly gambling was for idiots. I was stuck. I couldn’t - I couldn’t do it. It wasn’t possible. All this knowledge, all these stupid fucking predicitions floating round my head, and I couldn’t fix a damn thing because I wasn’t - because I didn’t - how the _fuck -_

Something butted against my knee and I froze, heart racing, chest tight, breath stuck in my throat. My chakra was gripping onto a nearby branch, vibrating with the tension of holding still and not kawariming me out of danger.

“Mrowr,” Tora repeated, putting both paws on my leg and stretching up. “Mrow-rr.”

I stared, waiting until the collection of individual hairs I saw resolved itself properly into a cat, then slowly unclenched my fist from around the shuriken I was holding and reached down to scratch her behind her ear. “Sorry,” I said. “I didn’t -” I stopped, took a breath, and forced myself to count it out. “Sorry.”

She purred. I kept stroking mechanically, shifting obligingly to her chin when she tilted her head until she took her paws off my knee and settled in a neatly tucked ball by my feet.

Ok. Ok. I was calm. I was logic. I apparently had also activated my sharingan, but I could turn that off and at least solve one problem of the day. I had to come up with a solution because if I didn’t I was fucked, that was something I couldn't get away from. But. I didn’t have to fight off an invasion by myself. I could… ask… for help?

I mean, no, I couldn’t. Not without a concrete alibi for how I knew what I knew or a foolproof way to both leave an anonymous tip and make sure it was taken seriously. The Sandaime was the only person strong enough to help, but he was low on the list of people I trusted even before I started sympathising with my clan’s plans to overthrow him. There was no way I was risking him knowing the tip-off came from me. Jiraiya, maybe, but he was a spymaster. Also not yet in Konoha, I didn’t think. If I tried to go through Kakashi it’d end up at the Hokage anyway at some point, and even if Kakashi didn’t rat me out he’d still want to know what secrets he was meant to be keeping for me. Anonymous was probably my best bet, but how? I was stealthy, yeah, but -

I stiffened, looking up to the wall. There was a ninja stood on top of it - a genin, I assumed, because he wasn’t wearing a uniform and he was barely taller than me. Also because his hair was flaming red and he had a giant gourd on his back. Those seemed like genin things to me.

Why was Gaara here.

“Can I help you, Suna?” I said. It was polite, in the way a customer services manager was polite, but I wasn’t trying particularly hard to hide that I wasn’t pleased to see him. “If you were looking for the door, I’d be happy to show you the way.”

In other words, get off the wall, fuckwit. This isn’t your village.

Good to know that my response to people who could crush me without moving was to passive aggressively antagonise them. Why. Do I do the things I do. What did I do to me to make me do this to myself.

“What were you afraid of?” he asked instead of answering. “Mother felt your fear.”

At my ankles, Tora hissed. She made no other attempt to move from her curled position though, and I subtly stepped in front of her.

“Failing,” I said, too on edge to deflect or think of a better answer. “Go back in the compound. Please.”

He hummed, making no move to obey. “Mother liked your fear,” he said. I felt a pressure building up, like the air around me was heavy. Not physically, but against my chakra - like trying to push kawarimi through a solid object, or stretch out my chakra sense when I was underwater.

I pulled my chakra back inside my skin until the feeling vanished, shifting to a more defensible position. Tora, I noticed in frustration, had got up to stand beside me, back arched and ears flat against her skull.

“Your mum sounds like an asshole,” I said sharply. His mum was also a tanuki demon. Kind of. Not that that excused the assholery. “Go back in the compound.”

He tilted his head. There were grains of sand shifting at his feet. Not many, and I couldn’t see any more coming out the gourd, but they were there. “You aren’t afraid anymore,” he said, and he actually sounded disappointed. Also slightly confused. He frowned, and the feeling of pressure was back against the edges of my chakra.

Tora growled an agitated warning, and I wound my chakra deeper into myself until what I assumed was Gaara’s chakra couldn’t reach me again. I was wary, and tense, and silently cursing Gaara for being an argumentative sod and not doing what he was told, but I didn’t yet see any danger signs. No bloodlust, no Shukaku - he was just posturing.

I opened my mouth to say something no doubt stupid and ill advised, but Chouji chose that moment to round the corner and interrupt.

“Sasuke? Why’s there so much killing -?”

Gaara shifted his gaze to him, and Chouji faltered mid sentence, eyes wide. Behind me Tora flattened herself to the floor with a pitiful yowl and Chouji flinched.

“Absolutely not,” I snapped, scooping Tora up and glaring up at Gaara. I marched over to Chouji and deposited the cat in his arms, physically grabbing them to move them in place when he didn’t seem to get the hint. “Hold,” I instructed, and turned back to where Gaara was blinking at me in shock.

“You,” I snarled, pointing aggressively, “Get off the wall. You’re in a foreign village. _Act like it._ ”

And, I think as much to his own surprise as anyone else’s, he took a step back. The sand around his feet reared back with him, hovering just in front of his shins as though he wasn’t sure what to do with it, and my brain caught up with my temper.

Shit. _Shit._

This was Gaara pre-Naruto. Traumatised killing machine. Very unhinged. Much death. _Bad_.

I channelled my sudden panic into anger and scowled, tilting my chin up for a better angle to stare him down. He didn’t have the monopoly on fucked up childhoods, but you didn’t see Naruto threatening innocent Choujis with his bijuu, did you. Get your shit together, Sabaku. You’re leaking confusion all over your expression and frankly it’s embarrassing. Go be traumatised on your own time.

“... Aa,” he said at length, and dropped off the wall in a swirl of sand. I reached out automatically to look for him with my chakra sense, but both he and the odd pressure had gone.

Dear fucking god, I could not believe that worked. Holy shit. _Holy_ shit. Damn.

“Um,” Chouji said, and I spun round so fast I nearly hit him with an elbow.

“Chouji! Akimichi, sorry. You. Startled me.” I shook my head, willing my heart to stop racing, and tried again. “Thanks for holding the cat.”

“Oh.” He looked down at Tora, as though vaguely bewildered by her, and tried to hand her back to me. “You’re welcome?” Tora wriggled out of his grip and landed on the floor with a miffed hiss, fur fluffed up so much she looked like a spherical brown cottonpuff. “I felt the killing intent and came to see if you needed any help. Who _was_ he?”

“Suna nin,” I said, trying to remember if Gaara had given me his name. I didn’t think he had. “He’s probably one of the genin competing in the exam.”

Chouji shuddered. “With killing intent like that? I hope not.”

I opened my mouth to respond, then closed it. I… hadn’t felt his killing intent? I’d felt the weight of his chakra, but I’d assumed he was just pushing it out as a solid presence like I did for kawarimi and sensing. It was intimidating, sure, but more because of how much he had rather than how bloodthirsty or angry it was.

I frowned. When Naruto had pulled on the kyuubi back in Wave, Sakura had been shaken. Badly shaken. Kyuubi’s chakra had felt like fire to me, hot and fierce and bright - but not malevolent. Not like killing intent. Or, not like I thought killing intent _should_ feel. Had I ever felt it? I’d thought Sakura was overreacting at the time, but maybe I was underreacting. I already knew I couldn’t sense chakra. Did that extend to killing intent as well?

That was… disturbing. I’d thought the lack of killing intent meant Gaara wasn’t seriously threatening us, but apparently he was and I was just not listening. No wonder he’d been surprised, I doubted many people in Suna would have stood up to him like that. Maybe his dad, hadn’t the Kazekage subdued his full Ichibi mode before? I couldn’t remember.

I’d taken too long, and Chouji was looking at me worriedly after the extended silence. "Sasuke? You look thoughtful."

I shook my head. "Sorry. Distracted." Was it only jinchuriki? Had I been missing other people's killing intent? It could be a good thing. Killing intent paralysed people, didn't it? Not being paralysed sounded like a plus. Chouji was still looking worried. I should talk to Chouji. "I'm fine, he just surprised me. You can go back to your patrol."

"You're sure?" he asked. "What if he comes back? I could let Asuma-sensei know that he was here, at least."

"It's fine," I repeated more firmly. If Gaara came back, Chouji needed to not be here. Easy. "You need to cover your part of patrol as well, don't leave a hole in the perimeter."

"If you're happy," he said, though he still seemed dubious about it. “Shout if you need me, right?”

“Right,” I agreed with no plans to follow through.

“Ok. Um, and, you can call me Chouji if you like,” he said. “I don’t mind.”

I paused, replaying the conversation in my head until I realised where I'd slipped-up, then hesitated. I didn't want to refuse and hurt his feelings, but I called everyone by their surnames. The only exceptions were Itachi and Team Seven, and I'd originally added Team Seven to the list under duress. It shouldn't be a big thing - I called people by their first names in my head, it was easier - except that in a way, it was. I liked Chouji, but I meant what I said about not having friends, and there was a reason for it. If I didn't have _some_ way of keeping that distance, I'd forget.

“Thank you,” I settled for saying, and retreated to my spot against the wall, Tora sticking close enough to be practically under my feet and warbling a low growl as I went.

Chouji smiled, and, with a last look up at the wall, left to go back to his post. I raised an eyebrow at Tora.

“My bento’s vegetarian today,” I told her. “It’s also mine. Whatever you’re hoping for, you can’t have it.”

She flicked an ear at me, then settled down for a victorious wash. I rolled my eyes. “Chouji will have meat. You should've gone with him. I’ll trade him for an onigiri at lunch, if you’re still here.”

Three boringly uneventful hours later, I pushed myself off the wall with a sudden inhale of realisation that sent Tora rolling off my lap in an inelegant sprawl.

The Kazekage _had_ subdued Gaara in full Ichibi mode. When he was a kid, his uncle tried to kill him and Gaara released Shukaku on Suna in retaliation - and the _Kazekage defeated him_.

The Kazekage who Orochimaru was going to kill and replace. Which therefore meant, the Kazekage who wasn’t on board with Orochimaru’s plans.

The Hokage wasn’t my only chance for stopping the invasion; I had an ally, I had information that would save his life, and - most importantly - I had someone who didn’t know the truth about Itachi and who wouldn’t be suspicious of me because of it. If I could get - Raza? Rasa? Rasa - to break off the alliance with Sound the invasion would be derailed before it could start. If I could go a step further and turn Rasa against Orochimaru himself - which, the guy was going to kill him and wear him like a onesie, it shouldn’t be hard - then maybe I could even solve the cursed seal issue at the same time.

Yes. I had a plan. I dropped a hand down to Tora’s head and rubbed her ear in apology for disrupting her nap, and barely stopped myself from laughing in relief.

I had a _plan._

_Yes._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Asuma: carefully draws out his team without pushing too hard, sets reasonable boundaries, explains why he does the things he does, praises them when they get things right. Possible flaw: too lenient.  
> Sasuke: who is this man. well-adjusted? _suspicious_.
> 
> And with that, we've reached the chunin exams. As always I'm going to take a minor break between arcs so everything's ready for the next stage, so see you all in roughly a week (or come hang out on [discord](https://discord.com/channels/709856860932538468/709856860932538471))!


	20. Chapter 20

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Chunin exam arc, let's go~

The chunin exams were four days away. The Kazekage would arrive the day before and would be staying on the upper levels of the largest building in the diplomatic compound. He would post his own guards within the building, but Konoha would continue patrols around the edge of the compound - though they were framed more as ‘general village security’ to avoid being too pointed. The day he arrived would be spent being welcomed by the council and the Hokage, and the ones following that would be spent in talks to improve inter-village relations and renegotiate any contracts and agreements between our villages.

The Otokage was not invited. Sound had sent two teams, who were staying in a different complex. Orochimaru’s location was unknown.

We patrolled with Team Ten on the first and third day. On the second, we trained with the dogs while Kakashi lurked in the trees and attempted to murder us at random intervals. Ino joined us for our morning sparring on all three days, Shikamaru and Chouji only on the third. We split into pairs that day for individual spars and learnt that, without their admittedly flawless teamwork to rely on, Team Ten were no match for Team Seven. When it came down to straight one on one fights we _flattened_ them.

I’m not going to lie, it was incredibly satisfying - but also worrying. Too many of their skills were based on complimenting each other’s kekkei genkei, and it made them vulnerable in a way that set my skin crawling. All you’d have to do would be take one member out and the rest of the team would be easy pickings, how was I meant to keep them alive with that kind of disadvantage?

“We aren’t easy pickings,” Shikamaru pointed out sourly. “We also haven’t been running ANBU drills for the last three months. Your team is insane.”

“Stop being a baby and just admit that you suck,” I told him. “We’ve been doing standard genin training. We’re just better at it than you.”

The fourth day Naruto and I had as a day off, with strict instructions to replenish any supplies that needed topping up, train only enough that we weren’t stiff but not enough to tire us out, and not do anything stupid without Sakura to curb our more idiotic ideas. Sakura and Kakashi disappeared for, I assumed, some last minute cramming - none of us had forgotten that she was the one most likely to be promoted.

 _Most_ likely. Wave was where Naruto decided what ninja he wanted to be, but it had taken him some time to work out how to apply his new resolution. A month of missions and training later, I dared anyone to look at him and deny that he’d make a good chunin. If they did, they were probably being biased against his name or his demon, and they deserved to be stabbed for it.

And on the fourth night, I lied to Naruto about wanting to visit the family shrine by myself so that he’d sleep in his own apartment, ate an early dinner of leftover oden, and, in complete defiance of Kakashi’s instructions, prepared to do something stupid.

“Ok, Aniki,” I breathed, pulling out the box of his ANBU uniform. “Let’s hope my stealth is as good as I’ve been claiming, because I really need this to work.”

I wasn’t taking chances. I wore his clothes under the ANBU armour - not the ones of his that I’d been borrowing for the past few years, but the ones a size up that I hadn’t yet moved into. I was lucky that I was short; I was almost the same age as when he’d left, if I’d been any taller I would already be wearing these day to day and not have them kept back as too-large spares. With the armour over them the bagginess was barely noticeable, but the more important thing was that they didn’t smell of me and they didn’t smell of my detergent - I’d trained too much with the pack to make a basic mistake like that.

Underneath the clothes I’d showered with mission soap rather than my usual shampoo, and because I didn’t have my headband to keep it out my eyes I’d pulled the front and top sections of my hair into two twisted buns while it was still wet. It was only half-up, still too short at the back for anything more, but with my bangs and the signature floof on top of my head under control, I didn’t look immediately recognisable as me.

I paused. The point was not to look like me. Everyone thought Sasuke was a boy. ANBU uniforms were unisex, and the buns were a very feminine style of practical.

My mother’s red and gold flower pins were in the box with Itachi’s mask, and the senbon I’d used to secure my hair could easily work themselves loose.

I clipped them in before I could let myself think on it too much, then used a roll of bandages to bind down the fabric around my shins and give the illusion of wider hips above them. I couldn’t do anything about my chest - though, twelve, I wasn’t really meant to have one - but the straps on the armour were adjustable and by wrapping the ties round higher up my waist, I could create a passable attempt at a teenager beginning to develop curves. Then - I shouldn’t. I’d be wearing a mask. My clothes were one thing, I could justify them, but no one would see my face. I didn’t own makeup, and if my mum had left any, it would be years old and take too long to find.

It was ridiculous. I was wasting time.

The only ink blocks I had were black, anyway. Even if I used the smallest calligraphy brush I’d still only get eyeliner out of it, and it wasn’t like changing the shape of my eyes was going to make a huge difference to anything. Eyeliner, and, if I remixed the ink with a lot more water, the faintest hint of shadow on my lips. It would look stupid during the day, but in the moonlight it should be at least vaguely realistic, and when it was done I gave myself the chance to inspect it in the mirror before I grabbed a face cloth and wiped it off.

Except, I didn’t wipe it off.

I didn’t look like the girl I used to be. Too pale, too angular, still no freckles. I didn’t look like my mum either, like I had done when I’d tried growing my hair out before. And - I didn’t look like Sasuke. Not - I meant canon Sasuke. The original one. The boy I’d replaced and still felt sometimes like I was only an impersonation of. I didn't look like him. I looked… like me. I just looked like me.

There was something bigger there, waiting on the edge of my thoughts. I flicked my eyes red and captured the image of myself in the mirror, then deliberately put it aside.

“Later,” I said, deactivating my sharingan and dragging my eyes away. “There are more important things.” I strapped Itachi’s tanto to my back - I didn’t know how to use it, but it was part of the disguise and I felt more comfortable with it than without - and filled the weapon pouch on my right leg with senbon and an equal mix of shuriken and kunai. I overused shuriken to potentially an extreme degree, and I’d considered not including them to distance ANBU-me further from Sasuke-me, but decided against. The lack of them would be more notable, it was foolish to bring attention to something I was trying to hide. The poisons though I did leave out as all of mine were from my garden and I couldn’t risk them being traced.

I pulled on my sandals - no socks - and ran through a few stretches to make sure everything sat as well as it could. The differences were strange; gloves instead of arm protectors, no high collar with the front cut out, the armour less restrictive than I’d expected but more restrictive than I’d like. I’d never seen an ANBU tattoo in real life and didn’t want to copy it wrong, so I’d left Itachi’s sleeves over my shoulders - they came far enough down my arms that they met the gloves. Other than my toes, the only bare skin showing was my face.

And, when I lifted the mask and held it in front of my eyes, there was not even that.

“ANBU Weasel,” I said, voice low and hushed. I’d already checked the mask with my sharingan and laboriously decoded as many of the seals as I could. Sealing was a long way from a skill set I was comfortable with, but I recognised ones to hold the mask on, to distort voices, avoid restricting vision, muffle the sound of breathing, prevent condensation from my breath collecting by the nose - most of them were to do with practical things. There were a couple I couldn’t work out but I was _pretty_ sure they weren’t going to track me or kill me when I put the mask on. Mostly sure. Unless the ANBU who wrote them had an Uchiha standing by to tell them how to fool a sharingan, but I thought that was unlikely. Those were not the sort of secrets we liked to give away.

I grit my teeth. I was dithering. Whether it was the idea of a mask restricting my breathing, which it _wouldn’t_ but a fear of drowning was hardly rational enough to care about that, or the association of it being _Itachi’s_ mask that symbolised his loyalty to the Hokage and his betrayal of the clan - I didn’t know. Probably both.

“Yeah, and they’re both pathetic,” I mumbled, and pressed the mask on in one swift movement.

I had a moment of panic - it was heavy on my face, what if I’d misread the seals, it pressed over my _mouth_ how could I do the bubblehead jutsu if something was covering my mouth - but my frantic inhalation wasn’t blocked in the slightest. There was the faintest smell from the mask that I couldn’t place, and the feel of it against my skin was cool, almost like the underside of the pillow in summer. It was … fine. Not fine, because fine usually meant the opposite - it was good. I stared wide eyed at the mirror and a kunoichi in full ANBU uniform stared back and it was _good._

I swallowed a sudden bubble of laughter. “ANBU Weasel,” I said through a giddy grin. “Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to save the Kazekage and stop the war. This is our most desperate hour. Help me ANBU Weasel, you’re my only hope.”

The eye slits were so small you could barely see my sharingan. A faint hint of red, mostly hidden in shadow; without the tomoe visible they just looked like red eyes, and those were far more common than you'd expect. I was set. Costume on, script ready: showtime.

“Wish me luck,” I mumbled to Plushie-tan and the fish, and dropped soundlessly out the window. I moved through a combination of kawarimi and sprinting that should be almost impossible for any pursuers to follow, heading for the river that ran through the Uchiha lands and tracing its path back to the main village rather than risk taking the front gates. Not that I thought I had pursuers, but given how illegal what I was doing was I couldn't afford to take any chances. Once I left the relative safety of the clan lands I moved under a henge that blurred my edges and camouflaged me into the background, abandoning the kawarimi in favour of keeping my chakra tightly suppressed.

The path I cut through the village was slow and indirect. I avoided anywhere important that I thought the village might have increased security on, and I left as wide a berth as possible around the diplomatic areas where genin from the other villages were being housed. The only one I was interested in was Suna's, and the only reason I was risking approaching it when I knew it was being patrolled was because the past few days on guard duty had taught me the patrol routes.

Still though, I was wary as I approached the compound walls. Suna was our ally and the security reflected it, but we only posted genin during the day - on night shift, these were chunin. Not jounin or ANBU, as far as I knew, but I couldn't afford to treat them lightly. They were professionals, and I slowed to a cautious slink as I approached the section I’d staked out the day before, making sure my camouflage henge was as subtle as I could make it.

The chunin on patrol walked straight under me without noticing.

I paused, vaguely offended.

Unless it was a bluff? I activated my sharingan, scanning the area for genjutsu. There were none - though there were seals monitoring the wall and, from the look of it, about a metre and a half of air above it. I couldn’t see what they did, but I imagined they were best avoided.

I stared at the chunin, looking for anything that would give it away as a clone. It wasn’t an illusion clone - my sharingan would have picked that up straight away - but I couldn’t see any of the tell-tale signs of it being an elemental bunshin either. The hair fell like hair, the steps seemed to have the same weight as a person would, and the clothing moved like separate pieces with layers underneath rather than an outer shell patterned to mimic an outfit.

The chunin had, as far as I could tell, genuinely walked three metres underneath me without even looking up to check if I was there.

It took me _frigging hours_ to set this up. I was so damn prepared I’d worn homemade makeup _under the fecking mask._ The least the idiot could do was appreciate my damn mastery. Honestly. Twit.

I mentally shook myself and focussed. The chunin was a chunin, but she was also _only_ a chunin. She wasn’t the one I’d been worried about fooling, and I couldn’t afford to slip up because I was annoyed.

Sharingan still active, I picked out the best route over the wall. If I wasn’t worried about kawarimi I could switch straight past it, but I was nervous of chakra sensors. Particularly since discovering that I couldn’t feel killing intent, as it meant I was trying to hide from a sense that was completely alien and unknowable - the fact that I’d never felt anyone else use kawarimi was no longer the comfort it used to be, because apparently I was chakra-blind and useless in that department. Chakra-deaf?

Either way.

I waited where I was for long enough that the chunin looped past again on her patrol, and mentally marked any places over the wall that my sharingan picked up activity. She walked under me, again, and this time to her credit she did glance up and run her eyes over the buildings either side. It didn’t do her much good; I was tucked in a corner with a bunch of pipes that made it easy for my camouflage henge and faint genjutsu to blend me in.

When she’d gone, I angled myself at a suitable spot in the Suna compound, double-checked that none of the seals on the wall reached high enough to detect me, and leapt silently over. I moved fast when I landed, sticking to areas of foliage and parts of buildings with a lot of architecture. Heavy shadows were tempting, but a solid shape moving against a solid colour was easier to spot than a broken up outline against a busy background.

I slowed once I reached the building the Kazekage was staying in. He was on the upper floor, nominally more secure than the lower - though as ninja were just as happy walking up walls as they were going through doors, it didn’t mean much. He had his own Suna nin on guard, and unlike the Konoha chunin they’d know that they were in enemy territory and be much more vigilant because of it. However good my stealth was, I was still only a genin.

But I did have a trick up my sleeve. Suna was hot and dry, and from what I knew of their architecture they seemed to favour building with thick stone that would keep the insides cool. Konoha was mild in winter (officially, in reality it was bloody freezing but I was willing to admit that I was potentially more sensitive to the cold than some) but bordered on tropical in the summer, and our houses were built to fight the humidity rather than the heat. In the diplomatic compound, they were also built out of wood. This presented opportunities that, I hoped, someone from Suna wouldn’t think to be prepared for.

While the Suna nin watched the doors and windows, I crept up the outside until I found a part where the wood had swollen and warped over time and left a thin, barely visible crack between the slats that made up the wall. It wasn’t big enough even for a beetle to crawl through, but kawarimi worked on lines of sight - and with the sharingan, I could see through to the potted plant on the other side.

I slipped the faintest tendril of chakra through and held my breath.

No one reacted. Maybe they had no sensors. Maybe kawarimi was as subtle as I hoped. I gripped a drooping leaf tightly enough to tug it free from the stem, and swapped. The leaf would fall outside, but we were in Konoha. If you got twitchy about every falling leaf - come on. We lived in a forest.

Inside, I moved straight for the door to the next room. I was in a small antechamber, and from here I was going in blind because I didn’t actually know the layout of the house. Or where the Kazekage would be; it was late, but not yet ridiculously so, and if he was anything like the Sandaime then he could easily still be working. I hoped he was. Waking him up if he was asleep, or worse interrupting him in a bath was not exactly the best idea for the evening.

I blinked my eyes, fighting the urge to rub them. They were getting dry. I’d spent longer memorising the patrols than I thought, my chakra was running low. I needed to turn the sharingan off, but I couldn’t because I also needed to see.

I was in luck though. The first room I tried was empty, but with Uchiha levels of spying through tiny gaps I found him in the next one. He’d positioned the desk so his back was against the wall and he had a clear view of both the door and the whole room, and though he didn’t seem to have noticed me on my side of the door I doubted I’d be able to hide from him once I was in the room.

Because he was kage and I was genin and holy fuck what the hell was I _doing_ if the village knew I’d impersonated an ANBU -

Breathe. Zen. Calm. Do not fuck this up for us brain or I swear to god I will end you.

I held the script I’d planned in my head, and prayed that my voice wouldn’t squeak and refuse to work once I entered the room. There were no potted plants, but on the low chabudai table to the side there was a small incense burner with an array of unburnt sticks.

Wow. That was not a subtle way to insult your guests. Other than soaps and shampoos, most ninja avoided artificial scents like the plague - incense burners were reserved almost exclusively for religious and civilian buildings. Konoha didn’t appear to have gone so far as to _light_ the sticks, but even putting them out was a bold move that showed precisely how much power we thought Suna had.

I took a final second to centre myself, then reached for one of the sticks and swapped before I could lose my nerve. I dropped the henge as I landed and bent into a perfect formal bow, deep enough to show respect to a visiting kage, shallow enough to remind him that he was in my village and my loyalty was to the Hokage.

I mean, ANBU Weasel’s loyalty was. Mine… eh. What the Hokage didn’t know would, in a roundabout way, save his life and his village, so. Close enough.

“Kazekage-sama,” I murmured.

“ANBU,” he returned easily, not even taking a beat to show surprise. If he was surprised. God I hoped he hadn’t sensed me hovering outside the door.

I straightened, and kept my voice low and impassive. “The Otokage is not a man to trust,” I started bluntly. “He is an enemy of Konoha and no friend of Suna. Hokage-sama does not wish to see you betrayed.”

I’d worried about how to phrase the message. It needed to come from the Hokage - no one trusted a rogue ANBU, and letting _anything_ link back to me as Sasuke was too risky to contemplate. If the Kazekage thought the Hokage already knew about the invasion plans he’d blame it on the usual spies and espionage without me actually needing to back up how I found out - and, if he thought the Hokage was deliberately keeping quiet about handling it as a _favour_ to Sand, he shouldn’t bring it up in conversation or be surprised when the Hokage acted like he didn’t know. It was, plain and simple, a power play. Konoha was so vastly superior to Sand that this little invasion? Merely a squabble. It warranted a scolding and a reminder to behave, and the Hokage would pretend it never happened.

The Hokage was good at pretending things never happened. Ask Danzo.

In the seconds it took the Kazekage to reply, I doubted every step of logic and decided that I’d chosen the worst possible way to do anything and was going to die. But I’d said it now. So. Fuck.

“Nor would I,” the Kazekage finally replied, something in his voice I couldn’t place. Tension? I’d just thrown a hefty accusation at him, even if I hadn’t said it straight out. _I_ was tense from what I’d accused him of, even if I was doing everything in my power not to show it.

“He is glad,” I said, sticking to what I'd planned. Is, not will be - the implication being that the Sandaime already knew what Rasa would say, which in turn implied that Rasa had no choice and his only course of action was to fall in line. I had the entire contents of Fugaku’s desk seared into my brain, plus as many of the clan histories as I could find. I didn’t like politics, but I could do it if I had to. “Konoha does not make a habit of befriending traitors.”

I bowed again, and hoped the threat would hit right. I wanted him to think that Konoha knew exactly what he was planning to do, but were prepared to overlook it so long as no one ever found out. I also wanted him to think that if he so much as _breathed_ a word of this to anyone, Konoha would execute him eighty four times before breakfast. In an ideal scenario he’d quietly dismantle the invasion and no one in Konoha would ever actually find out what I’d done.

I also wanted him not to be killed, because he was now my only ally.

I _also_ wanted him not to kill me, because I was attached to being alive.

When I stood up, my eyes went immediately back to where I’d kawarimid in. It was an awkward angle without turning my head, but I could - just - see the incense stick through the crack underneath the door. God, my eyes were so _dry_ , I needed to deactivate the sharingan _yesterday._

“And what of Orochimaru?” the Kazekage said suddenly. I paused. “He’s Konoha’s, isn’t he? A traitor?”

The odd tone was still there, now combined with something that glittered almost like amusement in his expression. I was on dangerous ground. _He’s Konoha’s_ said _He’s your responsibility_ and if I agreed I was tacitly promising that the Sandaime would clean up his mess.

So I didn’t.

“Good night, Kazekage-sama,” I said, and reached for the incense stick.

He dipped his head in a pointedly shallow bow. “Good night, Itachi-san,” he said almost mockingly as I switched, and I landed on the other side of the door in a stumble with wide eyes.

Itachi - no. No no no he didn’t, he couldn’t, how? All the ways I’d worried about screwing up, how could I not have predicted this? What did I do? How did I -

I practically scurried away from the door, barely keeping my head enough to reapply the camouflage henge and keep my footsteps and thundering heartbeat silent. There was a Suna nin by the exit I’d been hoping to use, but I was too shaken to find another and I shot past him in another kawarimi.

Itachi. _Itachi._ I’d been so careful not to out my brother to the Hokage, now I’d outed him to an enemy, how in the _fuck_ did I -

But how did he even -

But - how?

There was nothing to connect me to Itachi. I was short. And being a kunoichi. Nothing I said even related to the Uchiha. He couldn’t see the sharingan, not enough to identify it through the mask I was wearing, so what - oh.

The mask. Weasel. Itachi meant Weasel. I was ANBU Weasel, and all he’d done was call me Weasel-san, and I’d flipped out.

I was an idiot.

“Holy fucking stupidity, batman,” I breathed, digging my fingers into my arms to ground myself. I blinked the sharingan off, wincing at how coarse and gritty it felt. I blamed the Konoha chunin patrolling outside the wall - if she hadn’t taken so long in her round, I wouldn’t have spent so long waiting to break in and my eyelids wouldn’t now be sandpaper.

Though, wall. Focus. I was still inside the Suna diplomatic compound, squirrelled instinctively in a high corner under the overhang of the roof. As safe a hiding place as it had felt when I was panicking, it wasn’t nearly as safe in reality. I sent out a brief chakra scan then aborted with a silent huff of frustration - chakra wasn’t safe, sensors were a thing, where the hell was my head at.

Wouldn’t it be nice if I could manage not to fall apart every time someone mentioned my brother.

I angled myself back towards the wall, scanning for patrols as well as I could without the sharingan, and prepared to move. I could just see the river, once I was there it was a fairly easy route back home -

“Konoha,” a voice said, far too close behind me. “Mother recognised your fear.”

I spun, eyes wide and shuriken already flying, but Gaara blocked them easily with his sand. More had gathered around my feet, locking them in place, and when I tried to leap away it gripped tighter and crept up to my knees.

Gaara held his palm out and started curling his fingers into a fist. “Your death will validate my existence.”

“My death won’t validate shit,” I spat back, and threw my chakra into a kawarimi with the furthest thing I could reach. I had a split second of horror when I landed to realise that the sand around my feet had been holding too tightly and I'd brought it with me before I was reaching again, this time for a leaf floating in the middle of the river.

“Bubblehead no jutsu,” I hissed, blowing frantically over the back of my hand as I sank. Please work, please work, _no the mask is in the way -_ I ripped the mask off just before the water rushed in and the feeling of the ice cube crawling up my face was the most amazing and delightful thing I'd ever felt in my _life._

“Ok. Ok. Oh god. Ok. Sand. Off. _Off._ ”

I kicked at it until it drifted away in the current, either too waterlogged or too far from Gaara to fight back. Then, I just… breathed. I had about ninety seconds. I could see the surface. It was dark underwater, and cold, and it pressed in on me in a way that should be terrifying, but I had my bubble. Water was solid to chakra, no one could sense me. I was safe. That fragile sort of safe that verged on the edge of hysterical sobbing laughter, but still safe.

“Look, Aniki,” I said, turning the mask in my hand so it was facing me. “I’m underwater. I'm good with rivers now. Go me.”

The weasel face did not seem impressed. Showed what it knew, if this had happened a couple of months ago I’d have flailed my way into a panic attack and drowned. Again.

Still, one lungful of air wouldn’t last forever, and I only gave myself enough time to be calm before pushing to the surface. Thank god I’d applied the camouflage henge before deactivating my sharingan, because my chakra reserves were so drained I doubted I’d be able to do anything now. I let the bubble dissolve as I reached air again and crawled inelegantly out onto the bank, wrinkling my nose at the dirt that stuck to my wet clothes.

And at the wet clothes that stuck to me. Disgusting.

“What were you afraid of? Was it failing again?”

No. _No._ I braced my weight on my hands and slowly lifted my head up. Gaara sat in front of me, cross legged on a floating platform of sand with his face in a mildly curious expression.

_Disgusting._

“I am not dealing with this,” I said, and ignored him in favour of laboriously pushing myself first to my knees and then my feet. My mask was still in my hand, but apparently Shukaku was a fricking chakra bloodhound who could recognise me by my panic attacks, so I didn’t bother putting it back on.

Oh, yuck, slippy feet in wet sandals and my toes were getting frostbite. Every step was squelching. I took back everything I said about being good with rivers. Water was horrible and it could go hang. I could taste ink from where the lip stain had started to run and I hated it.

“Why are you afraid of failing?” Gaara asked, dropping off his sand platform and walking beside me. I shot him the filthiest glare I could muster, dripping with river gunk and probably highlighted by wildly smeared eyeliner.

“Why do you care?” I shot back. “Piss off.” If he was going to kill me, then he was going to kill me. I could probably manage another kawarimi. Maybe. Stupid chakra-intensive sharingan. If he wasn’t going to kill me, well, telling him to get lost had worked last time.

It did not work this time.

“You aren’t afraid of me,” he said. He looked honestly confused by it as well. Did he have killing intent going? Who knew. Not me.

I stopped and turned to him. “Gaara,” I said, slowly and clearly. “In the rudest possible way, fuck off. It’s late. I’m tired. If you don’t let me go home and go to sleep I will find what you love and brutally murder it in front of you. _Get._ ”

His face closed off. “Love is a curse,” he said. “Those who claim to love you will only hurt you.”

 _Bed,_ I whined mentally. _I have an exam in the morning, you prick. Fucking trash panda. Sandman. You’re coarse and irritating and you get everywhere._ Out loud, I managed to condense that down to a belligerent, “So?”

He faltered.

“My uncle loved me,” he said, and I realised I was getting backstory. No. _No._ Backstory went to Naruto. I was not qualified to deal with this. I gave him my best bitch face and started walking very deliberately back to the Uchiha district. He kept pace with me. Of course he did. “He tried to kill me when I was little. It’s because of him that I wrote this kanji on my forehead, so that I would remember that the only person I would love is myself.”

“Grand,” I said. “Excellent. Well done. I’m so glad for you.”

He looked unsure, confused (again), and verging on the edge of hurt. I buried a scream of frustration.

“Things are more complicated than that,” I said, fishing desperately for something to say that wouldn’t make me feel like I was kicking a puppy. My eyes fell on the mask, and I went with it. “Like - my brother. He stabbed me. A lot. He also killed my whole family. And me. He killed me a bit. But he still loves me, it’s just complicated.”

That… was probably not helpful. See, this was exactly why Naruto was meant to deal with the traumatised people, not me. I sucked at it.

“Look, just forget the love thing, ok? People put a lot of meaning on one word and it’s not important.”

From the way Gaara frowned at me, I didn't think he believed me. Which was fair, because I was talking a load of bollocks and didn’t have the faintest idea how to salvage the situation, so.

Pakkun, help. How the frick do I people.

“What's important instead?”

“Not killing people?” I tried.

His frown shifted from perplexed to stubborn. “Mother wants their blood,” he insisted with no room for argument. “Their deaths are how I prove I’m alive.”

“Try ice cream, it’s better.” And, moving swiftly past that because _not now_ brain, “You can still kill people, just don’t kill people I like.”

“Why?”

“Because they’re mine and I’ll fight you for them? Because I said so? I don’t fucking _know_ Gaara, I’m just trying to go home. Ask someone else.”

He lapsed into silence, and I took it for the break it was. I was screwing this up. He was one of the important characters, and the connections he made with Naruto were a major turning point in his life, in the story, in Naruto’s life - hell, the whole future of Wind depended on him deciding to follow Naruto’s dream and become the Kazekage. I’d probably already mucked _that_ up by saving Rasa, so. This was just more of the same, really.

Sometimes I got tired of ruining everything. Maybe it was an Uchiha trait, maybe it was just a me thing. Grew up too far from the pack. Wonky puppy. Flipped wildly between anger and self pity with occasional breaks for showers and mochi. I had never wanted a nap so strongly in my life.

“I don’t want to ask someone else,” Gaara said finally, and I made a vaguely miserable noise of acknowledgement. “You understand love because you have seen what it does. You are afraid of failing because you know that your existence can be invalidated. And you fight because that is how you prove you exist. You are like me.”

 _You are not worth killing,_ I remembered, and pushed it out of my head. “That’s really not it,” I said tiredly. “I can see where you’re coming from, but… no. Just. No.”

“Then what _is_ it?” he asked, frustrated.

“I told you. I don’t know.” It clearly wasn’t the answer he wanted, so I relented. “I’m working on it, ok? Ask me later.”

“When?”

“ _Later._ When I’m not dripping river yuck down the back of my neck.” He was still pouting, so I huffed in annoyance and pushed at his shoulder. “Go back to your compound, Suna. You’re not meant to be this side of the wall without a guide.”

“I’m with you,” he said, and raised a hand to rub at where I’d pushed him. Baby. It was nowhere near hard enough to bruise.

“Yeah, well. I’m a shit guide. I’m also going to bed. Good night.”

“I don’t sleep.”

“I do. Good _night_.”

And, thank fuck, he hesitated, nodded, and disappeared in a sudden burst of sand because apparently he was a drama queen and normal exits were beneath him.

I let my shoulders drop and gave in to the urge to press my palms over my aching eyes. I couldn’t even go to bed yet, I needed to shower and get Itachi’s ANBU gear washed and dried and safely hidden again. It was a good thing, really, that the exam tomorrow would be relying on a trick question to pass, because at this rate I’d be lucky to riddle my way through a Turing test let alone a whole paper of fuckery and ninja hijinks.

“You best appreciate this,” I told the weasel mask I was still holding. “If you hadn’t buggered off to be a missing nin I wouldn’t have to stay up all night saving your village from an invasion. I’m stealing your dango for a year as payment and don’t you dare try and stop me.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Edit: have just realised that my end chapter notes didn't post. Sorry! I can't remember what I put, so have this absolute _gem_ from GhostSquid and empressofcali in the comments instead.
> 
> Gaara: I could kill you.  
> Sasuke: So could a determined duck, you aren't special.
> 
> Also, you may have noticed a new 'inspired by' work! I've put the comment AU ficlets up in their own work and added a couple new ones since the last chapter, so have a look at [A Surplus of Wisdom](https://archiveofourown.org/works/24421426) if that takes your fancy.


	21. Chapter 21

Much as I wish it didn’t, the morning of the chunin exams arrived precisely on time. I lay on my futon, wide awake, and quietly despised the fact that I was a morning person.

“Life is a never ending gauntlet of pain,” I informed Plushie-tan solemnly. “Shit. I forgot to set up the fish feeder for while I’m away.”

It wasn’t like the lack of sleep was even that much of a problem - I handled night watches without (much) complaint, and other than some lingering dry eye and headache from overusing the sharingan, I was fine. My chakra was maybe a bit low, though so long as I was careful with it and ate a decent breakfast, that should sort itself out.

Still though. There was a difference between being up late on night watch and being up late lying to kages and hiding from jinchuuriki at the bottom of the river. Everything about the day called for a mulligan, or at the very least a coffee-adjacent caramel concoction, and the strongest thing I had was kombucha. Which was _nothing like coffee._

I drank it anyway, wincing at the clash of the savoury flavour against my toothpaste, then followed it up with an entire mango. If the chunin exams went as they had in canon, we’d be going straight from the written exam to a five day survival exercise that we wouldn’t be given time to prepare for - I deserved a treat. I doubted the Forest of Death had much in the way of sweets.

Kakashi had been frustratingly tight lipped about what we could expect, so I decided against bringing a full mission pack. It would help, but the attention it drew wouldn’t, and since I was pretty sure the point of the second task was to cope with unexpected camping it may even be taken off me. I did however fit as many shuriken, socks, and ration bars in my assorted pockets and pouches as I could.

“Remind me, Plushie-tan. Why did I not become a sealing genius. I could be keeping entire wardrobes of clean clothes in my pinky finger. Mountains of mochi. I could have ice cream on tap, and then if someone ever stole my weapons pouch again I could just go _hah, sucker,_ and drown them in an avalanche of yuzu sorbet.”

 _Yuzu_ sorbet. Get it? Because it’s _sharp._

I may not have got enough sleep last night.

“I’m glad you appreciate me,” I muttered to the fish. Food timer activated and pellet jar refilled, I waved them goodbye and made my way to our usual training ground. We didn’t need to gather for the exam for another few hours yet, and Kakashi had, in theory, given us the morning off from training - not that he was ever there for our morning spars to begin with. So really, I could still be in bed recovering from dealing with unexpected Gaaras at one in the morning, then rock up at the exam hall well rested and ready to face the day in style.

You see now why I hated being a morning person.

“Stretch,” I mumbled, stripping off my jacket and leaving it in a heap on the floor. Stretch and plan. The last question on the written test should be a trick, but in case it wasn’t, I needed to take the exam honestly. By which I meant that I needed to cheat, but in the way they wanted me to cheat. Cheat the answers to the questions. Not cheat the exam structure by sleeping through it and passing on the foreknowledge that Ibiki lied.

Canon Sasuke had used his sharingan to copy the movements of one of the planted chunin. I wanted to keep my sharingan secret so I’d rather not, but if it came to it I was pretty sure I could do the same thing. Also pretty sure it would be easier just to look at someone else’s paper and read the answers off it - maybe the angle had been wrong for canon Sasuke? I didn’t think our sharingans would work differently. Would they? Maybe. Mangekyou could have distinct forms and my chakra was already different from his by being water instead of fire or lightning. So it could -

I stiffened imperceptibly, hearing the attacker a second before they flew at me. They were coming from behind, slotting into my blind spot with a textbook ambush attack and I dropped in an automatic dodge before I’d had chance to think. Duck, deflect, strike - their movements were weirdly similar to the standard patterns we’d been taught at the academy, and I felt a twinge of muscle memory urging me into the standard counter steps in response.

I ignored it. Konoha basic was too slow and too focussed on defence; I much preferred the faster and more vicious style Kakashi - and Pakkun - had taught. I slid out of the attacker’s hold and aimed a sharp jab at their neck, following it with a palm strike that would’ve broken their nose if they hadn’t abandoned their stance to block it, then finishing with a kunai digging painfully into the junction of their armpit and their ribs.

“I yield!” they - he gasped, freezing in place. “I yield, Sasuke-kun.”

I hesitated, but didn’t remove the kunai. I recognised the voice… and, after a second, spotted the henge. “Iruka?”

He dropped his disguise, the featureless bandana fading into his familiar coarse ponytail. He grinned ruefully at me, still careful not to move. Armpit wounds were lethal. “How could you tell?”

“You fight like an academy teacher,” I said, holding my position until I was sure that Iruka wasn’t another illusion. I withdrew, pocketing the kunai, and frowned at him.

“Ah, do I?” he asked, rubbing the back of his head sheepishly. My eyes narrowed. I recognised the gesture as one Naruto used when he was trying to deflect. “You don’t fight much like an academy student, Sasuke-kun.”

“I’m not.” His mouth twitched, as though it wanted to turn down at the corners and he’d suppressed it. I remembered wondering at the academy if he was expressive because he worked with children or if he worked with children because he was expressive. Either way it made no sense - why would he be sad that I fought better? He was a teacher. Dead enemies meant living allies. He should be _happy_ I fought better.

“No,” he said. “I suppose you aren’t.” He visibly shook himself out of the odd moment and offered me a more genuine smile. “Sorry for the intrusion, Sasuke-kun. When your sensei nominated Team Seven I wanted to make sure you were all ready for the exams, that’s all. Fighting ninja from other villages is dangerous, even if they’re also genin.”

“I know,” I said, no less confused. What would he have done if he thought we weren’t ready? “You’re not our Sensei anymore, though.”

“Guess I’m just slow to realise things!” he laughed, disguising what was clearly a lie with a joke I didn’t get. “I still think of you as one of my students, you know. Worrying about all of you is a difficult habit to break.”

I opened my mouth, then closed it again. Squinted. Iruka was… an academy teacher? Decently well rounded. Never progressed further than chunin. Scary enough to keep a class of mini-murderers in line, soft enough to consistently be one of the favourite teachers. I’d just beat him in a taijutsu battle that he had the advantage of surprise on, and I hadn’t even needed to use my chakra.

“... Thank you?” I said uncertainly. If we were ever on a mission, I was pretty sure I’d end up the one protecting him. But. The thought was appreciated?

“You’re welcome!” he answered with a cheery grin that I also recognised from Naruto. Did Iruka act differently outside the academy, or did I just know Naruto better now to see the similarities? “Good luck in the exams, Sasuke-kun. Remember that it’s better to survive than to win!”

And with that, he waved, and left. And I. What. What? No it wasn’t. I mean, it was, but Konoha was meant to teach that the mission took priority. Was he trying to subtly undermine me? Was this another layer of his test to see if we were ready? But he hadn’t waited for me to answer. If he wanted me to correct him and reel off the Konoha rhetoric to check that I believed it, he’d’ve at least given me the chance to speak.

… If he wasn’t a ninja, if we weren’t in Konoha, then would I doubt him? He could be just a teacher looking out for his kids. A genuine adult concerned about the fact that a bunch of midgets were being sent to potentially die for the sake of a promotion. Except, we were in Konoha, and only civilians thought like that. Didn't they? Kakashi had abandoned the mission in Wave when Zabuza threatened me, but he was _known_ for his weird fixation on keeping team alive. The fact that it was genuinely a weird personality quirk said enough about how Konoha usually viewed missions. And lives. Surely.

I stared after where Iruka had left for another moment then bent backwards into a handstand and started the flexibility routine again. I wasn’t sure, exactly, why the notion of him going against village teaching to try to keep us safe unsettled me so much, except perhaps that I’d got comfortable hating Konoha and everything it stood for and Iruka didn’t fit in with the way I expected things to work. Whatever the reason, I was glad when the other two arrived and I could abandon both my thoughts and stretches in favour of focussing on them.

“Morning bastard,” Naruto greeted, scanning me suspiciously as he dropped to a cross legged sprawl next to me. I rolled my eyes and shoved at his shoulder.

“I slept fine,” I promised him. It was even true, for the part of the night I wasn’t sneaking around. “No nightmares, the house didn’t eat me, I’m not a child. Stop fussing.”

He sniffed, but let it go. I considered needling him by pointing out that _he_ didn’t exactly look super well rested either, except I had a suspicion that he slept better when we were sharing just as much as I did, and that was a can of worms I didn’t particularly want to open just then.

“Everyone ready for the exam?” Sakura asked. “Naruto, you have your registration papers?”

He presented them with a flourish, and I lifted a hand to the pocket that mine were in. Sakura nodded, then brought out a scroll of her own that was too small to be an official document.

“I have something to show you,” she said cautiously.

“Is it what Kakashi was teaching you yesterday?” I asked. She bit her lip and nodded. I shared a glance with Naruto, both of us confused at her hesitance. “Ok,” I said. “Is it… a jutsu?”

“Um. Kind of? It, um.” She cut herself off and started again. “I can show you?”

I blinked. “Yes. That’s what you said you were going to do?”

“Ok, um. Right. Promise you won’t be upset?”

“Sakura-chan, what did Sensei do?” Naruto asked, leaning forwards and bouncing his knees with nervous energy. “Is it bad? Does it hurt? Can we fix it?”

“No, it’s - here.” She unrolled the scroll, lifting her thumb to her mouth and biting it until it bled, then smeared a red thumbprint over the back of the scroll. It sank in with no trace, there was a faint puff of smoke and -

“Pakkun?”

“Boy,” the little dog said in an offended, high pitched yip, “Do I _look_ like Pakkun?”

Naruto and I stared in stunned silence. The dog, which was fluffy, white, and other than the size looked about as far from Pakkun as it was possible to look, regarded us with a tilted head, then sniffed and flicked her curly tail at us.

“They’re not very bright, are they. Did you know that one of them’s a cat?”

“They’re just surprised,” Sakura defended. “Sasuke-kun, Naruto, this is Tsukiko. Tsuki-chan, these are my teammates, Sasuke-kun and Naruto.”

“Cat boy,” Tsuki said, looking at me, then at Naruto: “Fox boy.” He stiffened, but Tsuki moved on without giving anyone time to pay attention to his reaction. “Bitch, you said you had a pack.”

“Hey, don’t call Sakura-chan a bitch!”

“It’s fine, Naruto,” Sakura said. “It’s just _dog girl_. It’s the same as Pakkun calling us puppies.”

“He does?” Tsuki squinted at us, then nodded. “I can see it. Kitten, I don’t know what baby foxes are called so I guess you can be Puppy, and Bitch is still Bitch because she’s obviously the best.”

“Obviously,” I repeated faintly. Tsuki was a dog. That Sakura had summoned. A nin dog. She talked. Sakura had summoned a talking - _slugs._ She. Slugs? Oh no. No no oh no.

“Kakashi-sensei asked me to sign his contract yesterday,” Sakura said. “Tsuki-chan can’t fight, but she’s a good tracker and she can take messages to Pakkun if we need her to.”

“I can totally fight,” Tsuki complained. She danced on the spot, layers of white fur bouncing with each step. “Fight me Kitten, I need to show Bitch I can beat you.”

“Tsuki-chan, we have names,” Sakura scolded gently. “I don’t call you Bitch-chan.”

Tsuki considered. I used the pause to try and phrase an apology to Tsunade for allowing her apprentice to get stolen by dogs. It wasn’t going well.

“Fight me Kitten, I need to show Sakura-bitch I can beat you.”

“You’re not mad?” Sakura asked, switching her attention back to us.

Naruto wrinkled his nose. “Why would we be mad? She’s cute.”

“I’m beautiful,” Tsuki agreed, abandoning me and my complete lack of interest in sparring with her. “You can stroke me if you want. I’m very soft.”

 _Get a grip,_ I told myself firmly. I was making Sakura feel guilty. “Summon contracts are important,” I told Naruto. “If they’re clan summons, they stay in the clan. Some summons aren’t clan based and their contracts tend to go teacher to apprentice, but the dogs have been Hatake for… I don’t know. Dogs have always been Hatake. Kakashi passing on the contract to Sakura is a big thing.” Was there a boss dog summons that evaluated Hatake kids in the way the boss cat summons evaluated Uchiha? Curiosity made me want to know what had happened yesterday when Sakura got the contract, but I knew better than to ask. As easy going as Pakkun was, summons were not for outsiders to mess with.

“So Kakashi-sensei… adopted you?” Naruto asked, trying to work it out. “I thought you already had a family?”

“Sensei’s not my dad,” Sakura said, making a face. “And I’m not clan. I’m civilian, just with a summoning contract. It doesn’t actually make me a Hatake.” She hesitated, then added, “Right?”

They both turned to me, as the only clan kid on the team. Well, the only one they knew about, since I was pretty sure the Uzumaki were a clan. If they had a summons though I didn’t know about it. Not that it would make a difference to Naruto; having a clan summons didn’t stop you signing a contract with someone else - just look at Itachi and his crows, or canon Sasuke and his snakes. And hawks. If he had two summons, maybe Sakura could have dogs and slugs in the future if she wanted?

I shook myself out of that train of thought. Ignore the slugs. They weren’t important at the moment.

“It would to some people,” I said, disagreeing with Sakura’s statement. “Anyone who knows the Hatake will see Tsuki and assume you’re part of the clan. Even people who know you’re Haruno will still see your enemies as clan enemies and your allies as clan allies. It’s not family because it’s clan, but it’s. Kind of family? You support each other. And. Things.”

“Yeah, but,” Naruto said. “Don’t we do that anyway?”

I shook my head, trying to work out how to describe it. “It’s clan,” I repeated unhelpfully. “It’s less what you _do_ and more… how people see you? When it’s just you, you could hate each other, but when there’s anyone else there you have to be a united front. If the clan says something or votes one way or declares someone a friend, then it comes from the whole clan.” Alternatively, if the clan turns on the village and plots a coup, the whole clan must die. All or nothing. Clans don’t compromise.

“Clan sounds stupid,” Tsuki said, baring her teeth in an exagerated yawn. I bristled, and she let her tongue loll out in what I assumed was a doggy laugh. “Don’t listen to Kitten, cats always make things complicated. There’s pack, and there’s not-pack. If you’re pack you matter. Even if you’re a cat and a fox. If you’re not pack, who cares.”

“Team matters,” Naruto said, pointing at Tsuki and then at us. “Team is pack. We _were_ doing it anyway.”

Clan wasn’t stupid, but I also wasn’t the right person to explain it. I put it aside. “Team is pack,” I agreed, because that at least was a solid and easy thing to hold on to. And then I shot a smirk and Tsuki and added, “Even if it’s a cat, a fox, a bitch, and a pompom.”

“If you had a tail I’d catch it,” she promised, putting both her paws on my knees to raise herself threateningly to my eye level.

“Please don’t call me a bitch, Sasuke-kun,” Sakura said, though she seemed more distracted than annoyed. I still ducked my head in apology, then shot a glare at Tsuki for her victorious tail wag.

“You both don’t mind?” Sakura pressed, looking between us. “That Sensei asked me to sign the contract and not you?”

“No,” I said honestly. I minded that I’d stolen a key part of Sakura’s identity from her by changing canon enough that she might never be a slug summoner, but I didn’t mind that Kakashi had chosen her for the dogs. She was team leader, she was clanless, and even if Tsuki was a long way off having Bull at your back or Urushi and Uhei circling round your flanks, I couldn’t deny that it was comforting to have her with us.

Naruto though was much more straightforward, and he leant in with a beaming, excited grin. “It’s awesome, Sakura-chan! Just wait, when it’s my turn to get us a contract I’ll get the best summons ever and then Team Seven will have dogs and - and _dragons_ and be unbeatable, believe it!”

“I _am_ the best summons ever. Look how fluffy I am, you think anyone else has fur like me?”

I amended my previous statement. If Sakura followed in Kakashi’s footsteps then she’d presumably collect other dogs for her pack, and _they’d_ be comforting to have with us.

“I’m glad,” Sakura said through a relieved, if shaky, smile. “I was worried you’d think - I mean, I know I’m the leader but that doesn’t mean -” She abandoned what she was saying and blinked, and I noticed with horror that her eyes were suspiciously wet and shiny.

“Don’t cry,” I blurted. “We’re your team. You don’t need to worry. Why are you doing this. Stop.”

She huffed a beat of laughter, and when she smiled again it was thankfully more steady. “Don’t ever change, Sasuke-kun,” she said. “And thank you. Both of you. For being ok with it.”

“Of course we’re ok with it,” Naruto said, earnestly, almost shifting to a sitting down version of one of his inspirational poses. “We’re your team and you’re our team, Sakura-chan. Even if you’re a chunin and we’re not, or if you’re a Hatake and we’re not, or if, if _anything._ We’re bananas, remember? No one’s going to change that.”

Oh, god. I’d forgotten the bananas. Why.

In the face of his sincerity though, Sakura’s smile threatened to turn wobbly again. “I know,” she assured him. “And I’m not a Hatake, I’m still me. Um, still Haruno. I just... ” Her gaze flicked hesitantly between us then landed on Tsuki, and I thought for a moment she wasn’t going to finish. “I don’t want to be the sort of team captain that’s separate,” she confessed in a rush. “I still want to be Team Seven. With you. I don’t want to be better.”

Right up until that last statement, Naruto looked ready to leap in with assurances, but at _I don’t want to be better_ he faltered. I thought I understood though, at least in part - Sakura had downplayed her intelligence at the academy, and I had my own memories of how unpopular it could make you to show everyone else up, but that wasn’t really it. It was more that when I messed up in Wave, she was put on the spot to decide what happened. When we mixed up teams training with Team Ten, it was always Shikamaru and Naruto and me against Sakura and Ino and Chouji. She was the one given a summoning contract, she was the one expected to be promoted.

It wasn’t quite the same as being left behind while your two teammates advanced without you, but there was a divide being forced between her and us, and the end result wasn’t that different.

I wrinkled my nose. “Your hair is ridiculously pretty,” I told her. She seemed taken aback. “Also you are emotionally competent in a way that’s frankly unfair. And I have never once seen you drop noodles down your front when you eat ramen. How dare you.”

“Thank you?” she said unsurely.

“So,” I continued doggedly. “You’re already better. And we haven’t got rid of you yet. So. Stop thinking we will. Because we won’t. Because team.”

“Team is pack?” Tsuki clarified.

“Team is pack,” Naruto repeated with a decisive emphasis. “And when you win Sakura-chan, we’ll still be pack, except we’ll be pack that’s cheering for you.”

“Ok,” she said quietly, then again, stronger. “Ok. Team is pack. Bananas. I can do that.” She nodded, her face settling into a much more determined sort of calm. “Chunin exams. Ok. Let’s go.”

Sakura dismissed Tsuki before we arrived at the building the exams were held in. She was small, but even with Sakura’s excellent control it still cost chakra to keep a summon in our world - and right before an exam wasn’t the best time to run out. Plus, Tsuki was an ace up our sleeve that we didn’t want the other teams - even the other Konoha teams - to necessarily know about.

“I’ll get better,” she assured us. “Kakashi-sensei said the more I summon her the easier it gets. And she’ll need to train with us. She’s never been a nin dog before.”

“We can teach her!” Naruto said happily. “She’s basically a puppy, right? She can call me Naruto-nii like Konohamaru. It’ll be great, believe it!”

“She calls _you_ Puppy,” I reminded him. Her brash confidence did seem a bit young though, which I guessed made sense; if Kakashi was hoping for Sakura to build her own pack, then one that grew and learned with her would be a good choice.

“Who’s Konohamaru?” Sakura asked. “I didn’t know you had a brother.”

“He’s my rival! He’s the Hokage’s grandson, he’s going to challenge me for the position of Hokage when we’re older. I’m training his team to be awesome like we are!”

“He’s an academy student,” I added for Sakura’s benefit. We’d run into him once more since the disastrous meeting in the park; he’d been disguised as a particularly square looking rock, and been convinced that my attempts to avoid acknowledging him were due entirely to his overwhelmingly convincing genjutsu skills. The fact that Naruto had no hesitance in calling him out despite this was only further proof, in his mind, that Boss-nii was a ninja of unparalleled skill and distinction, and he’d pestered us for the next half an hour for a new cool jutsu to pass onto Udon and Moegi. Being shown how to throw kunai apparently didn't count as either new or cool, which I was actually a bit miffed about. When I was little I _loved_ learning how to throw things from my big brother. Honestly. Kids these days, all flash, no respect for the arts.

“... He’s a bit of an idiot,” I added on reflection. At least sexy no jutsu hadn’t come up. I was too much of a coward to ask, Konohamaru didn’t offer, but he also didn’t try to use it at any point so. Win?

“Someone nearly kidnapped him yesterday,” Naruto said, hands behind his head and grinning. I frowned, tilting my head cautiously. It didn’t _sound_ like the gremlin child was still in danger. “What happened?”

“I stopped them, of course! It was weird though. They kept going on about how dangerous it was to be a ninja and how I should give up, so I rescued Konohamaru and beat them up and told them I’d never give up while people needed me, believe it!”

“And then they vanished?” Sakura asked, sounding unsure. “Were they wearing a bandana? Because someone tried to attack me as well. I broke the tree they were hiding in and when it fell down they were gone.”

I groaned, relaxing out of my wary tension and reaching up to press my palms against my eyes. “Iruka,” I said. “He attacked me as well this morning.”

“What? No - why would he attack us?”

I moved my hands off my eyes and ran them through my hair instead. “He was checking to see if we were ready for the exams, he said.”

“Oh,” Sakura said, her frown smoothing out into a smile. “That was nice of him.”

I blinked. What. Someone attacks her, she drops a tree on them, and then she just smiles and calls it nice? Even after Iruka’d explained what he was doing I wasn’t sure if I’d understood or was meant to be looking for a deeper meaning. How did Sakura just accept it?

“Iruka-nii’s the best,” Naruto agreed easily. I redirected my skeptical blink to him. Unfortunately, he was too busy looking forward and grinning to notice.

… If both my teammates thought it was that straight forward then maybe it was? I mean. If anyone in Konoha was going to be a decent adult it made sense that it would be Iruka, but. He was part of the academy. He was the one who _taught_ us to be the child soldiers we were. He was nice, and important to Naruto, but he still believed in and passed on a system that sent kids to fight - and die - for their village.

And… he disagreed with the jounin senseis nominating us for chunin too early, and had taken the time to personally check that we were all ready for the exam because he was worried for us. He told me my life was more important, even though Konoha taught - _his lessons taught_ \- that the mission came first.

It felt like it should lead to something. Some revelation. It didn’t, because I didn’t want it to, and because even if it did I had too much other stuff going on in my life to pay attention to it, so I pushed the thought aside and focussed instead on the wildly impractical concept of: Should I be hengeing myself into bandana bandits and randomly attacking people to show I cared? I didn’t think Chouji would appreciate it, even if the ambush training would be good for him in the long run.

Speaking of Chouji though, Team Ten were waiting for us outside the exam hall.

“Forehead,” Ino greeted Sakura with a particularly smug smile that made Sakura raise a wary eyebrow. “Naruto. And Sasuke-kun!” The smugness morphed into something wide and knowing and I took an instinctive step back. “What’s this I hear about you rescuing Chouji from an angry Suna nin, hm?”

“What?” Naruto yelped.

“Oh he _did_ ,” Ino gushed, clearly in her element. I glanced uneasily at Chouji and stayed in a quasi-defensive position, but Chouji just waved sheepishly and offered a helpless shrug. “Stepped right between them and stared down the enemy, exactly like the cool guy hero should.”

“Did he now,” Sakura said tightly. I shifted slightly so my defensive position was aimed at her. “He somehow forgot to mention he’d been attacked.”

“It was while we were guarding the Suna compound,” I protested. “And I wasn’t attacked. The other guy was a genin, I just asked him to get off the wall and he did.”

“There was a lot of killing intent,” Chouji said. I shot him a betrayed look.

“And you know the best part?” Ino continued gleefully. “He was all calm and unbothered, then the Suna nin threatened Chouji and _bam!_ Sasuke-kun’s protective instincts activated!”

“‘Calm and unbothered’,” Naruto repeated. “Have you _met_ the bastard?”

Rude. I have zen. I have to fight for it, but I have zen. I do not have protective instincts though, that’s a slanderous lie.

“It was so romantic,” Ino finished, completely ignoring Naruto in favour of slinging an arm around Chouji’s shoulders and sighing dreamily in my general direction.

I could feel stone creeping in to my expression and clamped down on my chakra. I was trying to keep my sharingan hidden. Ino was not a credible enough threat to expose it.

“Ah, that’s not quite how it went,” Chouji said, ducking his head apologetically. I shot him a grateful look, then retracted it a second later as he added, “There was a cat, I think he was saving the cat as much as me.”

“ _So romantic,_ Sasuke-kun.”

“Oh, a cat?” Sakura said with forced calm. I wish I knew why she was so tense. I knew why _I_ was so tense, but I thought she and Ino had got past their weird rivalry over me. Sakura had dropped her fixation after being on the same team as me for a few weeks, and Ino hadn’t flirted since that first training mission we did together. “The cat explains everything,” Sakura continued, smiling sweetly at Ino the way she did when she had the upper hand in a spar. Naruto made an aborted _retreat?_ signal with his hands and I tried to edge away, but she spoke before I could. “Right, Kitten?”

I froze. She froze. Naruto froze. Ino choked. Even Shikamaru stopped trying to pretend he didn’t know us long enough to double take.

Weird names inside the team were one thing. Tsuki was a dog. I honestly couldn’t care less what she called me. But how the fuck was anyone meant to take me seriously if my nickname was _Kitten._

Actually. You know what? How the fuck was anyone meant to take me seriously if I was so obviously uncomfortable every time someone flirted with me but never did anything about it. Ah yes, that Uchiha Sasuke character, defected from the village so he could infiltrate a terrorist organisation and take it down from the inside, what a champ. Terrified of a girl he knew who had a crush on him. Thoroughly intimidating.

Also. I was very subtle when I wanted to be, but I had never in my life hidden that I didn’t like people liking me. Ino maybe was wilfully blind but Sakura wasn’t, which meant she knew I didn’t like it and did it anyway. Hell, Ino can’t exactly have missed that I never reciprocated, and she did it anyway too. Probably more as a way to express their rivalry with each other than out of any particular desire to date me. How Chouji got roped into it, I didn’t know, but Sakura at least I’d expected better from.

“Right,” I agreed, as mildly as I could. She was pale, eyes wide and locked on mine. “You know me and cats. Hate water, hate dogs, eat fish, we're exactly the same. Have fun with the pack, Sakura-bitch.” She flinched, but I kept smiling at her. Best eye smile. Tilted head, very cute. What was it? Adorably innocent, I think they’d decided I was. “Coming, Naruto?”

And I walked past them, looking forwards and completely unbothered by their reactions. I heard Naruto take a step and then hesitate, and I frowned. Yes, Sakura was the team leader, but I was annoyed. That took precedence. “Naruto,” I repeated sharply, reaching back with my chakra and tugging on his jacket. He mumbled something to Sakura that I didn’t catch, then trotted up after me.

“That was a bit harsh, bastard,” he said in a low voice. I didn’t look back and I didn’t stop walking, but I did pull a face.

“I thought we were using the names Tsuki gave us,” I defended.

“No you didn’t. You’d’ve called me Puppy if you did, and you wouldn’t have threatened to leave her after she just told us it was what she was afraid of. You did it because you were angry at her.”

I did look at him this time, shooting him a glare and getting a supremely unimpressed look in return. “Who died and made you emotionally mature,” I muttered. He crossed his arms and continued waiting me out. “Fine,” I relented. “I don’t like it when people are romantic about me and she shouldn’t have called me Kitten. Happy?”

“No. You need to apologise to her.”

“She needs to apologise to me!”

“That too,” he agreed, and I paused, thrown. “I’m not saying she was right,” he continued. “I’m saying you can’t react to everything by getting angry. It doesn’t help.”

“It got me this far in life, didn’t it?” He frowned at me and I rolled my eyes to disguise my instinctive back-tracking. “Fine, sorry, not the time. I’ll apologise to her, ok?” Just stop being disappointed at me, fuck. That was an entirely unfair expression to direct at someone who was nominally the same age and actually a lot older than you.

Not that I felt a whole lot older. She’d known as soon as she said it that she misstepped, if I was really the adult I claimed to be I wouldn’t have needed to drive the point home like I had. Hell, if I was really the _friend_ I claimed to be, I wouldn’t have done it. I could’ve asked her to stop in any number of ways, but instead I’d deliberately chosen the option that targeted her insecurities, and I’d done it in a way that still, somehow, hadn’t actually asked her to stop.

My mouth twisted down and I looked away. Great, now both Naruto and I were disappointed in me. And I was still hurt that Sakura was slipping back into competitive flirting as part of whatever she was doing with Ino. If that was even competitive flirting. What an excellent start to the exams.

I glanced back over my shoulder unhappily. Sakura was with Team Ten, trailing in after us. She looked as miserable as I felt, and Ino hovered next to her uncertainly, clearly wanting to give comfort but unsure how it would be received. Chouji was on her other side, angled towards her and trying to offer her a chip, but Shikamaru was standing apart.

He looked up and caught my eye, and I ducked my head away from his too-sharp intelligence. Why, I wanted to know, was I so quick to get angry and fuck things up if I hated the aftermath so much? You’d’ve thought I’d learn at some point that it was better not to open my mouth.

“Hey,” Naruto said, bumping his shoulder against mine. “She’s not going to be mad at you.”

“I called her a bitch,” I said. “She even asked me not to call her a bitch less than an hour ago.”

“Yeah, but you didn’t stab her or anything. It’s fine. She’s upset about hurting you and you’re upset about hurting her, so you say sorry and forgive each other and then life is good again. It’s how it works.”

It’s really not, I thought. It sounded like something he’d been taught, maybe one of Iruka’s lessons. The non-killing people lessons. Easy, simple, the way the world should work and the way you teach it to little kids, but in reality words are messy and poisonous and do more damage than kunai if you aim them right.

Not that _have fun with the pack, Sakura-bitch_ was quite on that level. I hoped. It was more that I’d never been angry like that at her before, and I wasn’t meant to be the sort of person that hurt people I was meant to protect. That was canon Sasuke’s game.

… I shouldn’t be bringing him into this. I was the one who lost my temper, and now I was the one blowing a childish insult out of all proportion. Fuck’s sake, Uchiha. Get a damn grip.

I felt a tug, freezing me in place for a second and I tensed, looking back warily. It was Shikamaru - I saw his shadow retreating from where he’d used it to get my attention. _Talk to them,_ he mouthed, jerking his head at Ino and Sakura. He’d moved up to stand next to them, and I guessed he must’ve said something because now they _both_ looked vaguely miserable and guilty.

I scowled. _Piss off,_ I mouthed back. He returned my scowl with an annoyed _tch_ and dropped back into a slouched position behind them, everything about him radiating how troublesome the whole situation was.

Ass.

“Bastard,” Naruto warned, jabbing me with his elbow.

I transferred the scowl to him, and, because he was in hearing range: “Ass.” But I also hunched my shoulders and tapped a warning signal against my thigh until I had Sakura’s attention.

 _Mission failure,_ I signed, because I didn’t know the exact hand signals for _I fucked up._ She shook her head and I repeated it more forcefully, tacking on _Require backup_ when I was done.

She bit her lip, said something to Ino, and came up to join us. “I’m sorry,” she said, almost before she was in earshot. “I should’ve realised we were making you uncomfortable.”

“I shouldn’t’ve got angry,” I returned, uncomfortable but also unwilling to let her stay guilty. I tried to crack a smile and ended up with a lopsided smirk. “There are worse things to be than kittens. Just think, I could be Nara.”

“Sasuke-kun,” she scolded. “He’s not that bad.”

“Yeah, well.” I was sure he wasn’t. I was also sure I was a creature of habit.

“He… He pointed out that you’ve never liked people paying attention to you, even at the academy, and maybe there was a reason for it. And… And I’m sorry. I just got caught up in everything with Ino, but I should have noticed - I should have noticed ages ago, but I didn’t, and. I’m really sorry.”

“Stop. Um. Apologising. Please stop apologising.” This was literally the most awkward conversation I’d gone through in my life. _Maybe there was a reason for it_ \- I didn’t even want to _know_ what conclusions Shikamaru had drawn. “It’s ok, really, I don’t - I mean, I do mind when it happens, but I don’t mind if it doesn’t happen, as in. Um. I’m sorry for calling you a bitch. I don’t really hate you for being a dog person. Please stop being sad.”

She ducked her head and opened her mouth, probably to apologise again and I panicked because then _I’d_ have to apologise again, but thank god Naruto cut in before she could. “You two are disasters,” he complained. “You goofed, you said sorry, are we good? Can we go?”

Sakura and I shared a look. I rolled my eyes and she smiled, and yeah. I guess we were good.

“Ok,” she said. “Chunin exams, right?”

“Right,” I repeated, relieved. I was meant to be worrying about losing my eyeballs, not losing my temper. We headed for the stairs, bypassing the frankly shocking genjutsu some chunin were attempting to project over the second floor (they’d chosen the blandest, most obviously fake personas for their henges - I was offended on behalf on genjutsu users for their lack of imagination or realism), and I tried to wrestle my mind back on track.

Chunin exams. First task. Cheating time.

Let’s go.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Iruka: _beaten up by naruto, has a tree dropped on him by sakura, held at knife point by Sasuke_  
>  Also Iruka: Worries about his kids because they're small and he doesn't want them to die  
> Sasuke: Is this. A trap? 
> 
> If you're wondering, Tsuki is a Japanese spitz. Also if you're wondering, the fact that Sasuke can't _feel_ killing intent may or may not mean that she can't _project_ killing intent.
> 
> And if you're only subscribed to this story and not to me in general you may have missed another ficlet AU update in A Surplus of Wisdom, so head on over if that's of interest to you!


	22. Chapter 22

Lee crashed on the scene as a bowling ball of green. I dodged, heart rate spiking and kawarimi lashing out to grab the nearest object in preparation in case I needed to make a hasty exit. This turned out to be a door, one that would probably end up ripped off its hinges if I did have to switch with it, but seeing as the area was depressingly lacking in pot plants or decorations it was the best I could do. Which, thinking about it, rude. I should send a strongly worded letter of complaint; every public space needed to be liberally scattered with kawarimiable objects, didn’t they know that ninja were easily startled and required plenty of hideyholes to feel safe in their environment?

When I actually recognised the mess of spandex and legwarmers as Lee though I faltered, and stared at him in blinking incomprehension. He winced. He then followed his wince with a cower and attempted, pathetically, to push himself into a sitting position. Lee. He. No? What the hell. Had Gaara gone bijuu? Did Orochimaru attack? Who the fuck got the drop on _Lee_?

I flicked my gaze uncertainly back in the direction he’d come, shifting to put him behind me in case he genuinely was as injured as he was claiming to be. Sakura picked up on my reaction and moved instinctively to join me while my mind spun, trying to work out what had happened. I couldn’t _see_ a four storey sand demon anywhere. Lee was weak to genjutsu, and if I were setting up an invasion I guess it wouldn’t be a _bad_ idea to try to take out the stronger Leaf genin before the exams started, but.

Actually. Table that thought. That’s a good thought. I’ll want that later.

Back to the but. Tenten - or who I assumed to be Tenten; she wore the familiar pink top and her hair was up in two neat buns that I was insanely envious of - was hovering in front of the chunin guarding the fake entrance to the exams, timidly protesting that they needed to be allowed through. The chunin, unsurprisingly, were laughing in her face and calling her weak. Which she wasn’t. Also Neji was with her and there was no way on earth he would fall for a genjutsu, so. What. What?

“It’s not even a good genjutsu though,” I said, falling out of my ready stance. I shared a confused look with Sakura and glanced behind me to where Lee was being helped up by Naruto - and froze. He was looking back at us with genuine tears in his eyes, his hands pressed against his mouth and his shoulders quivering with suppressed emotion.

At least. I assume suppressed emotion. He sure as hell wasn’t suppressing _enough_ but I couldn’t think what else they’d be quivering with.

“Um,” Sakura said. “Are you… ok?”

“Sakura-san!” he declared, flinging his arms out in a grand gesture that I had to step back to avoid. “You would selflessly throw yourself into battle to protect me - truly, you are as youthful as you are beautiful!”

“What in the fuck,” I mumbled, backtracking as he threw himself forward into a bow that was _far too deep._ Sakura seemed rooted in place though and didn’t react fast enough to escape as he reached for her hands and stared at her with adoring wide eyes.

 _Wide._ He. Had a lot of eye. To wide with. The whites went all the way round, holy fuck get some eyedrops. _Blink._ I was squinting in sympathy just _looking_ at him.

“I, Rock Lee,” he said, completely ignoring my telepathic advice on proper eye care, “Pledge myself to be your eternal admirer and devotee. Tell me! Will you go out with me?”

“No,” Sakura said, staring back at him with eyes almost as wide. She didn’t even stop to think, and I was probably not meant to be as impressed as I was at how blunt it came across.

Lee wilted.

I refused to be sorry for him. His first impression was bad and he should feel bad, what the hell did he expect.

“You can let go now,” I said, gesturing helpfully at where he was still holding her hands. “She said no. It means no. Go away.”

He transferred his overly-intense gaze to me, and shifted immediately into - I think another inspirational pose? Why did everyone have inspirational poses? I thought it was just a Naruto thing. God, did _I_ have an inspirational pose? Would I know? What if everyone was just being polite in not mentioning it? No, wait. I wasn’t inspirational. I’d have a brooding and tragically misunderstood pose, shit that was worse. I was never going to move again.

Making this resolution while Lee was standing opposite me was appallingly bad timing on my part.

“Uchiha-kun!” he fucking _beseeched_ me, the guy was _illegal_. “I’ve wanted to fight you for a long time, and now you’ve shown yourself to be a ninja of youth and true character. I would be honoured to call you my rival!”

I opened my mouth to follow Sakura’s example and say no, and accidentally kawarimid back to Team Ten instead.

“Do I have a sign on my forehead,” I hissed. “Uchiha Sasuke, single and ready to mingle, seeking moron who can’t take a fucking hint?” I was rude. I hated people. I literally _just_ told him to go away. That did not mean _please request to be my rival,_ it meant _I think the fuck not_. Also, _go away._

“No,” Shikamaru yawned. “You're cute everyone's heard of you, and you have a reputation for being an asshole but in real life you're bad at hiding how much you care. It makes people feel special if they can get close to you.”

“Nara, you suck _._ ”

“Ugh, he’s not even handsome,” Ino complained, with a tentative side-eye as though checking it was ok. “You could do so much better, Sasuke-kun.”

“But not with me,” Chouji said. I turned to him, nose scrunching up in confusion, and he shrugged bashfully at me. “Sorry, Sasuke. I don’t think I’m gay.”

“Um. Good to know?” I made an aborted motion to pat him on the arm and turned it into an awkward kind of wave instead, then decided to ignore his statement and focus on Ino instead. She was holding herself in an overly-casual pose, still clearly tense and waiting for my response, and my mind blanked on what to say.

“Um, unless you like him?” she amended, turning to reevaluate. “He’s, um, he looks serious about his taijutsu, which is good.”

“What.”

“He could be really sweet,” she continued, warming to the subject. “And in light of letting Sasuke-kun choose who Sasuke-kun dates, we’ll support your choices and help you win the man of your dreams!”

“Please don’t,” I blurted. “I mean, thank you for letting me choose, but I don’t. I mean. I don’t want to win. Him. Or do better. Or. Do. I don’t do.” She frowned, the confused frown of someone genuinely trying to understand but struggling to interpret the complete mess some idiot had given her, and I looked at the other two for help.

Shikamaru rolled his eyes. “Do you want to date anyone,” he said, monotonously enough that it barely qualified as a question.

“ _No._ ”

“There you go.”

“Oh,” Ino said dubiously. “If you’re sure?” I made a strangled sound and she shook herself. “Well, ok. Let me know if you have any other dreams I can wingwoman for, because I swear, _someone_ round here needs to have an ambition they need help with or I’ll go mad.”

“Naruto's going to be Hokage," I offered. Then, at her unimpressed look, "And Lee wanted to date Sakura anyway. He asked me to be his rival. With the fighting and the rival things.”

She flicked her hair dismissively. “Well, you can't be. You’ve already got a rival. And _Sakura?_ She could _definitely_ do better, we should rescue her. Is that spandex? And his eyebrows, wow.”

“Or rescue him from Sakura,” Chouji said. “She looks like she’s going to punch him.” They started walking up to where Sakura was, indeed, looking ready to punch Lee despite Naruto’s attempts to keep the peace, and I stared after them in confusion.

“I don’t have a rival.” I squinted. Did I have one I wasn’t aware of? No one had mistaken Naruto for my rival for ages. Also, if people were only allowed one then surely he had Neji, what did he need me for? “I'm a delight and I keep people at a distance, I’m not a rival-having sort of person.”

“Do you actually listen to half the things you say?” Shikamaru asked, turning back to look over his shoulder at me. “You’re an idiot.” I scowled as I jogged to catch up.

“I despise you,” I told him. Then, for emphasis, because he didn’t seem as mortally wounded by that as he should, “Bitch.”

“Female dog or insult?”

“ _Bitch._ ”

“Uchiha-kun!” Lee said, spinning to face me and interrupting whatever scathing remark I’d been planning to follow up with to Shikamaru. “I wished to spar against you to prove that a genius of hard work was a match for a genius of good fortune, but your teammates kindly informed me of your dedication to preserving your strength for the exam! It would be the epitome of unyouthful for me to ignore your wishes in such a way - but I shall return when I have found a more suitable time for our rivalry to commence, and shall win the spar and fair Sakura-san’s heart another day!”

He struck a pose. I stared at him, then shifted to look judgmentally at my teammates.

Naruto grinned. Sakura shifted uncomfortably. Which meant that Naruto had come up with the lie and Sakura knew it was shit but had backed him up when she realised it seemed to be working. Clearly she was choosing to overlook the whole _winning her heart_ thing in favour of brutally rejecting him again the next time he asked her out.

“I’m not fighting you,” I said with as much finality as I could. His face fell, again, but before he could rally himself against what must be an old hurt of being looked down on, I caved: “You’re Gai's kid and a taijutsu specialist. You're terrifying and I'm pretty sure you'd beat me to a pulp. It would hurt. I don’t do that.”

It was the wrong thing to say. He straightened, eyes welling once again with tears, and dear god I was glad he didn't have chakra because if a fucking sunset genjutsu appeared behind him I was _out._

"Uchiha-kun, your belief in me has inspired me to train harder to live up to your expectations! But you must not be so lacking in faith in yourself, your ability to see a person's hidden strength makes you truly worthy of your title of rookie of the year!" I twitched. I thought I'd left that damn title behind. He noticed, and must have taken it for disbelief because his expression filled first with sorrow then a frankly alarming determination. "I will respect your decision not to fight and I understand that your focus for now is on the exams, but if I can share with you the meaning of youth and bring you confidence in your abilities then I shall. As the student of my sensei's rival I have a duty not to abandon you, and if I fail I will run a thousand laps of Konoha on my knees in penance!" And with that final threat, he bowed again, and retreated cheerfully to his team to get chastised about how they were meant to be keeping a low profile so the other genin would underestimate them.

There was a somewhat dumbfounded silence in his wake.

“I think you broke the floor,” Shikamaru muttered, kicking at a random spare tile lying cracked in two pieces. I blinked at it, trying to work out what the hell it had to do with me, then glanced back at where Team Ten had been. Sure enough there was a tile missing that I’d apparently ripped up and kawarimid with.

“Not my fault,” I dismissed, collecting myself and heading decisively for the stairs. “The interior decorating sucks, what was I meant to do. Are we taking this exam or not?”

_Interlude: Team Eight, who we haven’t seen for a long long time_

Team Seven and Team Ten came in together, which was not so much of a surprise once Kiba thought about it. Ino and Sakura, Chouji and Sasuke - hell, Ino and Sasuke, even, though that was as one sided as it got.

He took a second to feel sorry for Team Seven. Naruto was generally considered an annoyance but especially disliked by Sakura, Sasuke tried to avoid most people but Naruto _and_ Sakura in particular, Sakura had her overwhelming crush on Sasuke - they’d be a disaster. Not like Team Ten, who were made for teamwork, or Team Eight, who had settled into a comfortable dynamic after a relatively short period of awkwardness. He wondered how Team Seven managed to qualify for the chunin exams; they’d only been on one c-rank, according to the grapevine, and it’d gone so badly it’d taken them a month to complete it.

Embarrassing.

As he watched, Naruto suggested something with a bright smile that made both Sakura and Sasuke bristle in response. Good grief, he thought. Here we go again. It was only a surprise that Sakura wasn’t punching Naruto into the ground for it.

He drifted subtly closer. Not fast enough to catch what Naruto said, nor Sakura’s reply - he didn’t want to be obvious about eavesdropping, though from Shino’s raised eyebrow his team at least could pick up what he was doing. He did catch Chouji’s question though, and the rest of the conversation that followed.

“Would it be so bad to just fight him, if that’s what he wants?”

“You can’t _give in_ to people when they ask for things like that,” Sasuke protested hotly. “What if he thinks it’s permission to stick around? I might never get rid of him.”

“Besides, he only wants to fight the bastard because he’s an Uchiha,” Naruto said, his distaste at the idea clear in his tone. “It’s dumb.”

Kiba sucked in a sharp breath at that. Family was important, sure, but Sasuke’s loyalty to his clan was on a whole other level. Naruto not only calling Sasuke a bastard but also calling the Uchiha dumb, the _face_ Sasuke was pulling... “Fight, fight, fight,” Kiba chanted under his breath, grinning unrepentantly at Shino’s eye roll.

“Kiba-kun, that isn’t very nice,” Hinata said, hovering anxiously. “Should we stop them?”

“No,” Shino said. “Why? Because though Uchiha is clearly annoyed, it does not appear to be at Uzumaki and he’s not lashing out like he would usually do. We should wait and see how they react before we involve ourselves in a situation we don’t understand.”

“Boring,” Kiba complained, but then Sasuke started speaking again and he hushed the other two to listen.

“Make him be Sakura’s rival. They can bond over hitting things stupidly hard, if he still has a crush on her when she’s broken his spine then we’ll know he’s beyond saving.”

“Sakura _has_ a rival, thank you,” Ino sniffed.

“But not a love rival,” Naruto added, throwing his arm over Sasuke’s shoulder and leaning on it. He flashed what might almost be a warning grin at Ino over Sasuke’s head, except what the hell, it was _Naruto_ hadn’t he and Sasuke been about to argue over him insulting the Uchiha? Sasuke didn’t even snap at being used as an armrest, just pouted - pouted! - grumpily and gave a half-hearted attempt to wriggle out. Ino made a _yeah yeah_ motion with her hands and relaxed into a natural, completely non-flirty smile, and Sakura didn’t even blush at the fact that Sasuke had just complimented her strength.

What.

Sasuke. Uchiha Sasuke. Relaxed, surrounded by people he was supposed to hate, two of whom were now _touching_ him because Ino had tugged on his hair and complained that if he was going to grow it out he could at least let her style it for him and all he did was wrinkle his nose and bat her away - _what_.

“Classmates of yours?” another genin asked, stepping up to them casually and tilting his head towards the others. Kiba flicked his gaze up to his headband, but it was Konoha, and he wasn’t picking up anything threatening in the other genin’s scent or body language. “I don’t mean to be rude,” the silver-haired - teen? He looked closer to twenty, but it was odd to be still a genin at that age - continued before they could answer. “But… aren’t you the clan heirs’ class? I thought you just graduated this year.”

Shino stiffened imperceptibly. Kiba picked up the cue and frowned, shifting himself to stand between Hinata and the other genin. He could feel Akamaru rumbling a warning growl, and lifted his hand to his hood to calm him. “So?”

“Ah, forgive me, I didn’t mean to imply anything,” the genin said, hands raised placatingly. “I was just surprised, genin aren’t usually nominated so early. Particularly ones so important for the village - the Uchiha is the last of his clan, isn’t he? He hasn’t even activated his sharingan yet.”

“So?” Kiba repeated, more aggressively this time. He wouldn’t call Sasuke a friend, but they’d all seen the aftermath of him losing his clan. He’d tried to pretend he was cold and unaffected, but he’d been frail and thin and small - when Kuromaru had picked Kiba up from the academy, he’d said that Sasuke smelt sick. He didn’t now, but friend or not, he was a classmate, and something about the genin’s questions felt too leading to allow.

“I see,” the genin said, and Shino cut across him with an irritated sound.

“Whether he has or not is not something we can confirm,” he said, shooting Kiba a look that said _how many times have I told you to think before you speak._ “Why? Because kekkei genkei are private, and he could have many reasons for concealing it if it had been awakened.”

“But as far you know, he doesn’t have it. I have these information cards, I’m just trying to keep them up to date - here, see? This is his. Uchiha Sasuke, last of his clan - and that one’s definitely true, right? He doesn’t have a sister, or a cousin?”

 _A-rank,_ Kiba saw as the genin flashed the card at them, and for a second he thought that must be a mistake. A-rank? There were chunin who wouldn’t be sent on A-rank missions, what the hell was Sasuke doing on one?

“Ano,” Hinata said, ducking her head as the attention shifted to her. “Those cards could be dangerous, couldn’t they? What information do you have on us?”

He stepped back, happy for his team to handle this one. He was better at fighting, Shino took the logic, but Hinata beat them both hands down for diplomacy and subtle interrogation. He looked over at Team Seven and Team Ten again, trying to see if he’d missed something. Team Ten, no - they were pretty much the same as they’d been back in the academy, other than their odd dynamic with Team Seven.

But Team Seven… Sakura’s shoulders were broader, her sleeveless dress and long gloves showing off her heavier muscles. With her hair back and her head up she looked confident, dangerous in a way she never had before. Naruto was quieter, more settled in his skin, and taller. He walked like someone who knew where his feet were, which didn’t seem like much until Kiba remembered how haphazard he’d always seemed - in life and in taijutsu both. And Sasuke…

He caught Kiba staring and flicked his gaze up. His eyes were as dark as ever, no sharingan-red in them, but they were somehow sharper than they should be. They passed over Kiba quickly - not dismissive, but also not surprised to see him - and moved on to the genin Hinata and Shino were talking to. When they narrowed, they were calculating, and when Sasuke turned back to his team his posture was wary without being tense in a way that reminded Kiba of someone.

He frowned, trying to place it. Alert but not seeming alert, not dangerous but still unsettling to any Inuzuka with instincts… He moved like one of Kiba’s aunts, the one who’d supposedly dropped out of active service but still kept going on missions and refusing to talk about where she’d been. He was still small, still slight, but he didn’t look much like he had at the academy.

 _“Cats,”_ Akamaru huffed, picking up on Kiba’s unease. Maybe, Kiba thought, though it didn’t seem quite right.

Still, though. He didn’t feel so sorry for Team Seven anymore.

_Kabuto,_ I thought unhappily. It wasn’t a sure sign that Orochimaru was involved - Kabuto did have a cover to maintain, and presumably it would be suspicious for him to withdraw. But it was a stark reminder that I’d only spoken to Rasa last night, and that didn’t leave a huge amount of time for things to change.

Not that I had much time now, because it wasn’t long after I spotted him that Ibiki made his entrance and explained the rules. I listened with half an ear, distracted by my own plans but still needing to confirm that the layout was what I expected.

Team Ten were too close. No one had yet said anything about tackling the second task together, because no one yet knew what it was - but we were too used now to working together for someone _not_ to mention it when the time came.

And even if they didn’t, Kabuto had approached Team Eight. That… was a worry. I’d appreciated Shino at the academy for being quiet and usually unbothered if I ended up sitting next to him, but other than that I barely knew them. If Orochimaru was only after a sharingan, they should be fine - or as fine as they could be in the forest of death, but I had to draw a line somewhere - but on the other hand, if Kabuto was already interested in them and they were just _classmates_ then Team Ten would be far higher on his list.

Too high to risk leaving alone.

“Start!” Ibiki said, and I pulled the exam towards me on auto pilot. It was the same, I’d listened enough to confirm that at least, and I was sat far enough back that I had an easy view of the rest of the room. Certainly enough of a view to see the cheating begin in earnest.

Was… Was I mistaken in thinking ninja were meant to be sneaky? Was that a large part of ninja life that I’d just _imagined?_ I could _see_ the mirrors moving on the ceiling as some overhyped hopeful used chakra threads to angle them to a better position. Gaara’s floating sand eyeball was just hanging there, out in the open, as though eyeballs were a thing that people didn’t routinely try to steal. The shimmering patch of floor that was moving up to lean over people’s shoulders was barely acceptable as a genjutsu. No. No, I take that back. It wasn’t acceptable. It was an insult. It was shoddy, and it gave genjutsu a bad name.

And, because the proctors didn’t seem to be putting a stop to it fast enough, I snaked out a tendril of chakra towards it and held my hands in a seal under the desk.

“Kai,” I murmured, barely audible and without moving my lips, and the genjutsu fell. That was the problem with a genjutsu anyone could see; if anyone could see it, then anyone could dispel it. The genin underneath froze in panic then tried to pull on a henge as someone from another village. Not that it mattered - he and his team had already been failed and he was summarily sent out, loudly complaining that someone had sabotaged him.

Idiot. Next round people would have tried to kill him, sabotage was practically a kindness. Which brought me neatly back to the thought I’d tabled earlier when I thought someone had tried to get the jump on Lee: taking enemies out before we reached the invasion stage of the exams was really not a bad idea.

There were two Sound teams. One hadn't made it through in canon but I’d seen the one that had on the way in and noted their distinctive patterned uniform, which I guessed was meant to be modelled after a vaguely snakeskin sort of aesthetic. Vaguely. It looked like a cow in need of moisturiser. I could see two of them from where I sat, the kunoichi and one of the guys, and also someone in a conical rice hat that looked _suspiciously_ like the ones they wore in Grass. I didn’t know how many Grass teams there were or whether this person was on the team that would get killed by Orochimaru and replaced, but if I got them out at this stage…

I mean, I’d be saving them from getting killed by Orochimaru when he replaced them. It was Rasa all over again, I was practically duty bound to do it.

I started with the Sound team.

The guy was not too far ahead of me. I didn’t remember his name, but he was heavily bandaged, and also clearly writing on his paper - and therefore, unless he was Sakura levels of genius (doubtful), clearly cheating. His writing was fairly confident, but varied in speed and included some short pauses… He was almost certainly copying someone real time.

So, an observational jutsu. Something that could monitor one of the chunin plants. His head was angled down at his paper, so probably not sight? And given the village he was from, hearing seemed likely. _Seemed_ , but this was mostly guesswork - I certainly didn’t know of any hearing based jutsu that would allow him to copy what someone else was _writing_. If he was using another method though, I couldn’t see it.

How would you disrupt a hearing jutsu? It would be harder to cancel than performing a kai on a genjutsu. If I had cover, I could attack his ears with a senbon to rupture his eardrum or - if I was feeling less subtle - a very loud explosion. Alternatively, just creating enough background noise to drown out whatever he was listening to, though I was less confident that would work.

I’d come back to him, I decided. Without knowing for sure that he was listening for his answers I didn’t want to risk it.

The other Sound ninja was the kunoichi - Kin, I think? - and was at a slightly more awkward angle for me to see. I bent my head forward so my bangs fell over my eyes and started moving my pencil over my paper as though I were writing.

She paused, then wrote something quickly, then paused, then repeated. Not real time, too bitty. She was getting information, then writing it down, then waiting for the next answer. My first thought was another sound based technique, but her left hand was held oddly - curled on its side with her thumb and forefinger angled over the top rather than flat on the desk holding her paper in place.

I dropped a very subtle dark-eyes genjutsu over my eyes to keep any red from showing and activated my sharingan.

Bingo.

The thumb and forefinger held a senbon, one she was tapping against whatever transmitter was hidden in her fist. I didn’t know the code, but it clearly was one; a mix of taps, scrapes and pauses that seemed similar to morse code. Either that or she had a tiny keyboard in there and she was using the senbon to press buttons.

I deactivated my sharingan, but kept the genjutsu running over my eyes. If I only ever applied it when I had my sharingan on it would be fairly obvious what I was doing, even though I didn’t think anyone had noticed it so far. Either way, it was small enough that it took barely any chakra or concentration to keep going, so I may as well. But Kin: someone on her team was passing her the answers. To get her caught, I needed to make her reveal the transmitter in her hand without being caught myself as the one to sabotage her. Also, I’d need to either sabotage her so obviously the proctors had to fail her or I’d need to do it twice - the two strikes and you’re out policy frustratingly worked against me here.

I started filling in the answers I’d seen on her sheet as I thought, because I did also have to pass the exam myself. I was _fairly_ confident that things would run as in canon unless I actively did something to change them, but I was also fairly confident that the repercussions of things I’d done previously would make it almost impossible to predict where those changes would come into play.

Besides. Even if the last question was as I expected, I still had my old friend paranoia to consider. I couldn’t afford to have people asking questions about how I’d known not to fill in the rest of the exam.

I wrote down the last of the answers I’d copied from her, then reached out with my chakra again. I still didn’t know how easy it was for chakra sensors to pick up, so I kept it subtle, a thin tendril snaking across the floor and up the leg of her desk. Once there I shaped it; small, unobtrusive - frightening, but not unrealistic. A scaled down version of a full illusion, enough to be effective, not enough to get caught. I angled one my hands to be hidden by the curve of my forearm and held it in a seal.

“Genjutsu,” I breathed, barely audible, and touched the chakra to her wrist. “Hell viewing technique.”

It swelled, bulging and darkening. Scorpion. Not a bad thing to be afraid of, really, and I shuddered as I felt its legs tapping against her skin as though it were my own wrist it were crawling up. She froze, and I gave it a nudge to make it raise its tail threateningly.

 _Shake it off,_ I pressed. _It’s going to sting, get it off, you have to get it off now it’s poisonous now now get it OFF_ -

With a muffled gasp she flicked her hand away from her, the transmitter flying wildly to clatter on the floor. I let the scorpion fly out with it then skitter under a neighbouring chair before I dismissed it - she was the only one who could see it, but that was no reason to be sloppy. I glanced over to the proctor I thought most likely to be watching her, and saw him frown and make a note on his clipboard. _Yes._

I paused, just in case I’d be lucky enough to get her out straight away, but no such luck. One down, one left; she was on her second chance.

I kept my face stone to stop my smirk. She wouldn’t be on her second chance for long. The transmitter was a couple of metres ahead of her, not visible from where I sat - but it didn’t need to be. My kawarimi sense was easily able to ripple along the floor to find it, and once it had it, picking up the small device was child’s play. I’d trained my chakra to redirect shuriken in mid air. A transmitter? Come on.

So when I scraped and dragged it along the floor, just enough to catch the proctor’s attention, then lifted it wobbling and uncertain into the air towards her -

“Number eighty one,” the proctor said, and I let the transmitter drop.

_Perfect._

I tilted my head forward, hair in my eyes, looking for all the world as though I was concentrating fully on my paper. It made it difficult to keep watching her but I caught enough to see she was white faced and furious, clearly aware that someone had got her out deliberately.

So long as she didn’t know it was me, I thought in satisfaction, and watched her teammate also push himself back from his seat with an angry shove. The third member of their party was somewhere behind me and I heard his muffled curse as he too joined them in exiting the party. Sound team out, just Grass to go, and I was five out of nine questions down on my paper as well. I left it a few minutes to avoid drawing suspicion then glanced up, looking casually over at the back of the Grass nin’s conical hat -

And then suddenly down at my paper, heart racing. Fuck me. That was Orochimaru. That was - _fuck me._ Practically turned round in his seat to look back at me, not even trying to be subtle, and the curve to his mouth was _amused._ Holy shit. What the fuck. I didn’t think he was meant to be here yet. Also excuse me, proctors, that’s an S-class missing nin and the only disguise he’s currently wearing is a fricken _hat_ what the hell are you even _doing._

I risked a glance back up, because if Orochimaru had broken cover then he was probably going to attack. Naruto I’d already spotted at the front of the room, and Chouji I could also see, but Ino was behind me and I couldn’t spot Sakura’s distinctive pink hair anywhere. I swept the room with mission-level efficiency; Shikamaru’s spiky ponytail was visible, though from his posture that was definitely Ino in control, Naruto had his hands behind his head in his _don’t mind me just making clones_ pose, but _still_ no Sakura so she must also be behind me which was at least closer to the door but how could I protect her if I didn’t know where she _was_.

I checked quickly on Orochimaru, then faltered. In his seat was a Grass kunoichi, frowning down at her paper. Her long dark hair and pale skin were fairly similar to Orochimaru, but only superficially. None of the proctors or other genin were acting like anything out of the usual had happened.

“Kai,” I croaked, barely remembering to keep my voice down and not move my lips. No change. I activated my sharingan, relying on the dark-eyes genjutsu I still had going to hide them. No change. The Grass kunoichi crossed something out and started writing, slowly and methodically, as though she were working out her answer as she went.

No, not as though. With my sharingan on, I could read her paper. She _was_ working it out - the chunin plants had written just the answers in, but she was going through the individual steps to reach the correct solution.

I deactivated my sharingan and looked back down at my desk. Five out of nine completed answers looked back at me. I picked up my pencil and numbly began filling in the sixth and seventh with the Grass kunoichi’s neat calculations.

Had I imagined it. Had Orochimaru showed me on purpose. Why would he show me on purpose. Could I get the Grass kunoichi arrested. Could I get her thrown out the exam. I had to get her thrown out. If she went into the forest, I was dead. But she wasn’t cheating. Was it her or was it Orochimaru. Did it make a difference. How could I sabotage them if they weren’t cheating.

I shook myself. If I sabotaged the kunoichi, he’d just possess someone else - at least this way I knew who he was. And the Sound team were still out. I’d just - I’d avoid the Grass team. Somehow. I could save this.

“Number 42,” one of the proctors said, breaking into my thoughts. I looked up just in to see the Grass kunoichi - to see _Orochimaru_ \- stand up from his seat and bow, then start casually making his way back towards the entrance.

His route was going to take him right by my desk. He’d got himself out deliberately so he could walk back via my desk. He knew I’d seen him.

I kept my head down, every muscle tensed and trying desperately not to look like it, and my chakra fixed on the furthest thing I could see in case I needed to kawarimi.

He went past. His hand was close enough to brush against my shoulder in a way that would look accidental from the outside. I didn’t breathe.

“Play nice, Sasuke-kun,” he murmured, then the hand was gone.

I didn’t look up. I still didn’t breathe. I also didn’t interfere with any other teams for the rest of the exam.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sasuke when Sakura says no to someone: it's. that simple. easy. look at that. 'no' fuckign _poetry_  
>  Sasuke when Sasuke has to say no to someone: language isn't real the stars are in retrograde and i have kawarimid GOODBYE
> 
> Whoops, apologies for the slightly delayed chapter, I got distraced first by another fic and then by life BUT here we are and we'll hopefully be back on schedule after this. Thank you for bearing with me! Also a quick note to say that I may not be able to answer every comment from here. I will still read and love all of them (so much!) and I will still answer questions and talk meta because _yes_ but to help me stick to reasonable updates I'm going to try and be sensible with what I can achieve <3


	23. Chapter 23

“... And then he said _You’ll never be chunin_ and everyone started leaving, which makes no sense because how could he stop us, huh? Like people can just _say_ things and expect everyone to give up because of it. And then -”

“I know,” Sakura said for the third time. “We were there, Naruto. We heard him.”

“Yeah, but can you believe it? What kind of dumb question was that?”

“He explained it after,” Shikamaru cut in, sloping up to us in his habitual slouch. “What scroll do you have?”

“Are you even attempting to be subtle,” I grumbled under my breath, but my heart wasn’t in it.

Apparently he was, because Sakura glanced at him, then faked an exaggerated grimace. “Ah, the same as yours,” she complained in a way that was just loud enough to be easily overheard. “I guess that means we’ll be hunting together?”

“Like old times,” he agreed easily. It made some of the people closest to us draw back with a frown; two teams that were used to working together made for a pretty convincing threat, and the fact that we had the same scroll meant we weren’t any more tempting as a target than a single team with one scroll. It wasn’t even that much of a bluff, except that we didn’t yet know if we had matching scrolls or not.

Sakura tapped her thigh and crossed her fingers. Clone. My heart sped up - who was a clone, had she found Orochimaru? Was it the Sound team coming back in under disguise?

“Trade you,” Naruto said cheerfully, and swapped one of Chouji’s chips for a bright orange mochi. It looked ridiculously unrealistic, but I barely resisted sighing in relief; _Naruto-clone_ , she meant, not a danger warning. A shadow clone. For Team Ten to dispel when they were through the gates so we’d know where they were. That sort of clone.

When I looked up, both Sakura and Shikamaru were frowning at me. I scowled back reflexively. “What?”

Sakura raised an eyebrow. Whatever she was about to say though was interrupted by the warning klaxon sending us to our respective gates.

"Guess that's our cue," she said instead, waving at Ino as we turned to go.

"Don't keep us waiting," Ino warned, flicking her hair in a perfect picture of lazy confidence. It was risky, but calculated; as the youngest entrants people would think we were easy pickings, and even if we weren’t the more of them we could scare off the better. I spared a moment to wonder how Team Eight were getting on and scanned the nearby gates, but I didn't see them. They must be at one of the further ones. Good - that was three people at least who I didn’t need to worry about protecting.

"You ok, bastard?" Naruto prompted in a low voice. I could've deflected, but - it was Naruto. And Sakura. And Orochimaru.

"Probably not," I said, aiming for humorously nihilistic and falling flat. I also flicked my fingers against each other in a way that said _enemies near_ and tilted my head slightly to indicate the other genin. There were three other teams at our gate, two from Sand and one from - Rain? One of the smaller villages, all eyeing each other up and trying to judge the value of a skirmish right out the gate.

Sakura nodded in understanding. "Stay low, go fast," she said, in a tone of voice which naturally meant get high, go stealthily. Normally I’d be all over this level of misdirection and double bluffing, but just at that moment it was frustratingly pointless. Someone fussing with a tiny little umbrella when what they needed were oilskins and a lifeboat. Maybe a hearse. No wait, hearses didn't exist. Black carriage drawn by four plumed horses. Hole in the ground and an immolation jutsu. Fuck. Pull it together. Sakura was looking at me worriedly so I nodded, and dutifully did my part in casting a genjutsu over us to allow us to fade into the shadows as soon as Naruto's decoys were ready to take our place.

The second klaxon sounded. The fake Team Seven bolted, straight for the tower and running at a full out sprint. I tightened the genjutsu enough to cover us until we took soundlessly to the trees, watching from the upper branches as one of the Sand teams fell for our bait and ran after our clones.

"Team Ten are that way," Naruto said, pointing towards one of the other gates. "Ish. They haven't dispelled my clone yet."

"How accurate can you be until then?"

He pulled a face. "Ish. Sorry, Sakura-chan."

"Ish is fine," she assured him, and set a steady, loping pace through the canopy. "Sasuke-kun, can you keep the genjutsu going?"

"While we're stationary," I said. "If you want it while we're running I'll need to upgrade." Call it caution, call it paranoia, I was not saying the word sharingan out loud. Not today.

"Save it. Unless we're being followed?"

I stretched out with my chakra to search for moving people shapes, then shook my head. "Not that I can pick up, but." That didn’t _mean_ much, stupid chakra-blind chakra sense now was _not the time_ to not be able to spot enemies coming. 

"Can’t hear anyone,” Naruto chimed in, tilting his head. “No one upwind.” He paused a second, frowning in concentration, before turning back to us. “We’re good.”

"Ok." We were running in a loose formation, Sakura in the front and Naruto and I flanking her and slightly behind. She glanced back at me, and Naruto switched his focus to listen as well. "Sasuke-kun -"

"Someone wants my family's eyes," I said bluntly. "I'm pretty sure they're targeting me."

“What?” Naruto snarled, dropping out of his position and reappearing on my other side in the next step, teeth bared and hands curled into loose, claw-like fists.

“Who?” Sakura asked sharply. “A genin?” She hadn’t shifted to an aggressive stance as obviously as Naruto had, but her fingers twitched in a way that said she wanted her chainsaws out. She led us further up into the trees, glaring at the branches around us with bristling wariness.

I noted their reactions with a kind of despairing fondness; yes, it was good they were taking the threat seriously, they’d _need_ to take the threat seriously if they were going to survive. But at the same time, it was _Orochimaru._ Claws and chainsaws wouldn’t do anything against him.

“Not a genin,” I said. “He was impersonating one in the exam, but he realised I’d seen him and deliberately got his team failed.” Realised I’d seen him - bollocks. He’d noticed me sabotaging the Sound team and deliberately shown himself to me. Why. Did he just want to mess with me, did he _want_ me to be pants-shittingly terrified because fuck it, I _was_ \- “I don’t know who he is now,” I said, wrestling my brain back under control. Panic later. Plan now. “I can still try and lure him out, but he knows you’re my team - he would’ve seen Team Ten too, you need to get them somewhere safe while I distract -”

“What the _fuck_ , bastard,” Naruto spat, whirling on me and forcing me to dodge into a crouch to avoid colliding with him and sending us both off the branch.

“I didn’t ask him to switch disguises! I thought -”

“ _Did_ you because that’s the shittiest plan you’ve ever -”

“Fuck you,” I hissed, and shoved him away from me. He barely moved, because he was stupid and bigger than me and I was a _tiny shrimp_ what the hell kind of plan was I _meant_ to come up with. “You can’t just hit things with more clones and expect it to work for everything, that’s how people _die._ ”

“Oh, what, so ‘people’ dying is bad but when it’s -”

“Boys!” Sakura stepped physically between us, pushing us both back. I stumbled, too frustrated to be graceful, and glared at her. She just stared back, calm and unimpressed and authoritative as though she could _team leader_ all the problems away, like if she went up against Orochimaru she wouldn’t break and it wouldn’t be my fault.

“He’s too strong to fight,” I said mulishly.

“You know him?”

“I don’t need to,” I retorted. “People have been coming after our eyes ever since Kakashi proved you can steal them.” I made an annoyed cutting motion with my hand and backtracked; I was scared and therefore angry, but it wasn’t Kakashi’s fault. “He didn’t steal his,” I amended. “But this guy - I thought I’d be ok because no one knows I’ve got them, but if he’s infiltrated the exam -” I broke off again. Sakura was still staring at me, tense but still under control, but over her shoulder Naruto hadn’t calmed down in the slightest.

“Sasuke-kun,” Sakura started, and I flinched. Without my foreknowledge, the explanation seemed weak. No wonder Naruto was mad at me.

“He told me to play nice,” I said in a last ditch attempt to make them see. “In the exam, I think he showed me who he was on purpose, and then he walked out and he knew my name and he told me to play nice.”

“I’m going to kill him,” Naruto promised, low and dark.

“Weren’t you _listening_? You need to get somewhere safe -”

“So do you,” Sakura cut in, and her expression was rigid but her voice was tight and sharp. I didn’t shake my head or glare at her but something must’ve shown on my face, because she frowned at me. “You get one chance, Sasuke. Tell me your plan and convince me it’ll work.”

I took a breath and tried to pull myself together. Plan. Ok. Plan. My original thoughts had revolved around staying with the team and keeping them safe; my biggest worry had been whether Team Ten would be too many people to protect. That had been a stupid worry, because Orochimaru wasn’t a threat I could protect _anyone_ from. “I can draw him off,” I said. “You two go with Team Ten, get out of the forest as fast as you can. He shouldn’t go after you. I don’t think. If he does, use Tsuki to call Kakashi. You’ll probably get disqualified from the exams, but.” I shrugged helplessly. Sometimes you had to prioritise. “I’m fastest by myself, I should be able to outrun him for long enough to give you time.”

“That’s it?” she asked. “Ok. That’s bullshit. New plan: we stick together as a team and you trust us to help you instead of running off to play martyr and get yourself killed.” I blinked, thrown - Sakura never swore, also what - but she’d already turned to Naruto.

“Team Ten are about three minutes that way,” he said before she’d asked anything. He didn’t look much less angry than he had before, and as he pointed I noticed that he did, in fact, have claws on the ends of his fingers. Somehow though he’d tempered his anger with a determination and protective fury that made him look older, more mature, and I was struck with the sudden, hysterical thought that if he survived this then I could totally see how he’d end up as the hero.

 _If_ he survived.

“You two -”

“Bastard?” Naruto interrupted. “Shut up.” He and Sakura fell back into formation, leaving a space open between them that was clearly meant for me. They stood, waiting, shoulders angled towards me, both of them stubborn and unmovable and refusing to leave me behind.

The thought came back, less hysterical this time. They both looked like heroes. Orochimaru was still a threat way beyond what we could take head on, but…

I felt better with them there than by myself.

I took a breath, and stepped forward into the space they left. They closed ranks around me, and in one synchronised movement, we leapt for the next branch.

“There’s been a change of plans,” Sakura said when we dropped out the trees in front of Team Ten. Team Ten - and Team Eight. She paused, frowning at them.

“Hi,” Kiba said with a half-smile and a cautious wave. “We overheard you talking outside the forest. Konoha should stick together, so. Here we are.”

“But nine of us?” Ino asked. “Getting six scrolls is going to take an _age_.”

“What’s the change?” Shikamaru asked Sakura, ignoring what sounded like an argument they’d already had. He glanced between me and Naruto as though he’d be able to work out why we were so on edge just by looking. Naruto had calmed, somewhat, but he still had his claws out and he was a far cry from his usual relaxed self.

“Someone’s using the exam as a cover to target Sasuke,” Sakura said. She still hadn’t picked the -kun back up, too focussed to waste time on being polite. “They’re able to get past village security which puts them at high chunin level threat at minimum, probably more like jounin.”

“Silver hair?” Kiba guessed, tilting his head. “Glasses, has his own data pages on all the exam entrants? He was asking about you earlier.”

Kabuto. I’d been so focussed on getting the Sound and Grass teams out, I’d completely forgotten he’d still be in the exam. His cover kept him as a fairly weak genin, and I could only hope that he’d be concerned enough about keeping it that he wouldn’t attack.

“What kind of questions?”

“If you had your sharingan yet, if you had any other family in the village - he seemed pretty keen on finding out if you were the last Uchiha or not.”

“Bloodline theft,” Shikamaru spat, disgusted. “What did you tell him?”

“Nothing,” Kiba huffed. “We said we didn’t know and then changed the subject. _Do_ you have it? Because if someone’s after you, it would probably be a good time to have a secret technique up your sleeve.”

“Piss off, Inuzuka,” I said in lieu of answering his question. What part of _secret technique_ would remain secret if I told everyone who asked. Idiot. “It doesn’t sound like the guy I noticed, but he was disguising himself as other people. We don’t know what he’ll look like.”

“So what’s the new plan?” Ino asked, turning to Sakura. “We stay together, safety in numbers?”

“What scrolls do we all have?” Chouji said. “If we gave Team Seven two and they just went straight to the tower, maybe…?”

“Heaven,” Sakura said. Shikamaru made a face and gestured at their own heaven scroll that Ino was showing us.

“You’re kidding,” Kiba groaned. “All three of them?”

Naruto made an irritated sound. “So we get an earth scroll. There’s nine of us - we get three earth scrolls, and we stay together, and if he comes after the bastard we beat the shit out of him.”

“Or retreat en masse and not get killed,” I muttered, then rolled my eyes as Naruto elbowed me.

Shikamaru looked back at Ino and Chouji, then sighed. “Troublesome,” he drawled, but made no move to leave or disagree with the plan.

“Team Eight?” Sakura asked, turning to them. “Don’t feel you -”

“I said Konoha sticks together, didn’t I?” Kiba interrupted with a tight grin. Over his shoulder Hinata and Shino stayed quiet, but they seemed happy enough for him to talk for them and neither seemed to disagree.

“Ok,” Sakura said, nodding. “Konoha versus the chunin exams. We get the scrolls, we stay together, we beat the shit out of anyone who comes after us.”

Ino laughed, vicious with anticipation. “Forehead, you make the best plans. Let’s go.”

We made quick progress the first day, and the day after that, cutting towards the tower in almost a straight line through the trees. Team Eight stayed further out, their skills uniquely suited to spotting danger or tracking potential targets. The next layer of defence was from Ino’s chakra sensing and a small hoard of Naruto’s clones, then the six of us in Teams Seven and Ten moved in tight formation in the centre. It didn’t make us particularly subtle, but our priority was speed - we wanted to be close enough to safety that we could finish the exam as soon as we had the earth scrolls.

Camp the first night was in a sprawling canopy as far up as we could go before the branches got too thin. We were all tense, and it showed in the way we instinctively stuck to the high ground - trees were our home terrain. They might not do much against Orochimaru, but against a standard enemy genin team? They’d have to be idiots to attack us where we had such an advantage.

By the third night though we were bold enough - and beginning to be achy enough - to take the ground. We’d reached the tower and circled steadily back out, wary of any teams attacking us, but none had. Nine genin was apparently enough of a threat to make even the more advanced teams think twice, and the combination of Team Eight’s tracking with our firepower meant that we’d easily overwhelmed the one team that hadn’t run in fright when we’d approached. Not that it had done much; they'd either already lost their scroll or hidden it so well that not even Hinata's byakugan could find it, but still. With no sign of Orochimaru and a successful confrontation under our belt, it was hard to keep up the tense fear of the first day.

Not that we were sloppy. Our camp was ringed with traps and we had two people on watch for each shift. That still left three of us able to sleep through the night, and I was corralled firmly to the most defensible part of the clearing with Naruto’s jacket dropped over me as he took the spot to my outside.

“I have my own,” I said, pulling a face at him.

“Mine’s warmer,” he shot back, which was objectively true. Plus, he was a furnace. If the jacket wasn’t so violently orange he probably wouldn’t bother wearing it all the time. None of us had bed rolls or blankets, and though we’d all been taught how to wedge ourselves into hollows and against the trunk it hardly made for the most comfortable of nights, even before you factored in the cold.

I stuck my tongue out at him and kept the jacket.

“... Huh,” Kiba said, watching us questioningly. His own jacket had been left aside for Akamaru, who seemed to dislike the cold as much as I did, and in the near-black under the trees he was difficult to see without wasting the chakra to activate my sharingan. “You actually do get on with people.”

“We’ve been a team for three months,” Sakura pointed out. Hinata and Shino were on watch again (byakugan and bugs, ridiculously overpowered combination) and she and Ino were checking the last of the tripwires set up around our make-shift camp site. Beside them, Chouji and Shikamaru leant back against one of the trees on the edge of the clearing, ready to take the next shift in a few hours - Shikamaru seemed to be stubbornly trying to use those hours to sleep.

“He was at the academy with us for years,” Kiba countered. “He still only cared about getting stronger.”

 _He_ is right here, dog-breath. Did it ever maybe occur to you that there was a _reason_ he only cared about getting stronger. She only cared. Fucking. Ugh.

Some of my thoughts must’ve shown on my face, because Naruto’s response was sharper than I expected. “Team is different,” he said. “Everyone’s different. People change.”

Kiba held his hands up, palms out non-threateningly. “I know,” he said placatingly. “I’m just trying to work out how. You aren’t what I expected.”

I made a noise of annoyance. “We would be if you were paying attention.” It’s not like Sakura or Naruto just randomly started being competent out of nowhere. Sakura had been the smartest in the year and could flatten Naruto with a single punch if she felt like it, Naruto had regularly evaded the teachers and - if rumours were to be believed - ANBU level patrols. What, were they meant to _not_ develop those skills and be better than everyone else? Moron.

“I’m paying attention now,” he said, and despite my attempts to redirect him to the others he turned back to me. “If getting stronger isn’t the most important thing, what do you care about?”

“Ending this conversation?” I shook my head. What. Was Kiba always this weirdly invasive? Maybe he’d spent too long around dogs. Maybe Hinata and Shino were his self restraint and without them he turned into someone with no concept of personal space.

“Geez, why are you so interested?” Ino complained, and I wasn’t sure if she did it honestly or to purposefully deflect attention off me, but either way I was grateful.

“Just curious,” he defended, still looking at me like he was trying to work me out.

“Well don’t be,” Sakura said, verging on coldly. “It’s rude.”

There was a pause. It felt tense, to me, and I resisted the urge to bare my teeth back at him. I had too many secrets to like people digging at the best of times, and I wasn’t that close to Kiba to begin with. Even if I was, he was being unsettling, and I was relieved when Naruto shifted to block his view.

“Shit, lighten up,” Kiba finally said, glancing away. “What’s the plan for tomorrow?”

“Find out tomorrow,” Sakura told him. “For now, some of us have the dawn watch and would appreciate the chance to sleep.”

With any luck, we’d pick up the scrolls we needed in the morning, and split back into our normal teams once everyone was safe. Nine people and a dog were too many, even if Kiba was the only one of Team Eight that ever really spoke.

Nothing. I growled in frustration and shoved my shuriken - that, yet again, I hadn’t got chance to use - back in my pouch.

“No,” Sakura groaned, looking at my face when we returned. “You’re kidding.”

“Wish we were,” Ino complained, stalking up behind me. “Third team today. Gone. Vamoosed. Vanished in the damn wind.”

“Maybe the next one?” Chouji suggested hopefully.

“You said that the last two times. I swear, someone’s warning them off before we reach them.”

“Or maybe none of you know how to be quiet,” Kiba said, too casually to _not_ be pointed. “We’d’ve got our scroll just fine if we weren’t carrying you around.”

I bit back on my instinctive defence of our stealth. I was pretty sure that Ino and I as a pair were at least sneaky enough to fool a genin team - I was pretty sure that by myself I could sneak past, say, a set of chunin level patrols around the Kazekage’s residence in the diplomatic quarters - but the fact was: we’d been hunting for hours today and on and off for the past three as well, and we had nothing to show for it.

Naruto bristled though. “No one’s carrying -” He bit off his reply when Sakura shot him a quelling look. We were all frustrated, even Shikamaru mustering the energy to scowl.

“Maybe he has a point,” he said. “We’re getting nowhere as a group, maybe it’s time to split.”

“We’re still safer as a group,” Sakura said, but from the way she was frowning I could tell she saw the logic in the suggestion. Frustratingly, so did I, even if every fibre of me rebelled at the thought of making ourselves vulnerable like that. “Even if some of the stronger teams have already finished, that just means that the people left will be more desperate, and that’s leaving aside that whoever’s after Sasuke-kun is still out there.”

“We stay close,” Shikamaru countered. “We meet up for the night again, and we’ll take clones so we can call for back-up if we need to.”

“Shino has bugs,” Kiba added. “And if we still haven’t got enough scrolls by the evening, the others will be easier to attack when they’re asleep.”

Ino nodded, as sick as I was of being sent out on stealth runs that led to empty camps. “I should be able to feel if you flare your chakra,” she said. “Except you, Sasuke-kun. Even Sakura’s easier to feel than you.”

“Really?” I perked up, grateful for the distraction. All that panic about whether my chakra-blindness meant I was being really obvious every time I used a jutsu, and now Ino was saying I was hard to detect? I’d take that. I reached out with a chakra tendril and waved it in front of her face, but she didn’t react until I poked her in the cheek with it.

She slapped it away, irritated. “Quit it. What is that, some kind of chakra blade?”

“Kawarimi,” I answered, pulling back smugly. I didn’t know if she was the best sensor, but she definitely wasn’t the worst. I’d _definitely_ take that.

“So, splitting up?” Kiba pressed. “We’re all agreed?”

Sakura glanced at me. I hesitated; we were still safer as a group - but six extra genin and a dog wouldn’t do a thing against a sannin. Maybe… they’d be safer if they weren’t with us? I didn’t know why he hadn’t already attacked; we were now over half way through the exercise, what was he waiting for? Then again, if he _was_ delayed, then taking the chance to get the scrolls and leave would be our best bet. The forest was dangerous whether we were in a group or not, and without scrolls we couldn't leave it. Was it more dangerous to take the risk and get the scrolls fast, or play it safe and spend longer in the forest? Neither options sounded great, but. We'd been getting _nowhere_ sticking together.

I caught Naruto’s eye. He didn’t seem ecstatic, but he nodded when I raised an eyebrow.

“We’re good,” Sakura said, turning back to the others. “Meet at the bend in the river with the poisonous vines at sundown, it’s close enough to the tower that we can make it tonight if we get all the scrolls we need.”

“We’ll bring you extra,” Kiba promised lazily, and gave us a parting salute as he and his team headed off, two kikaichu buzzing towards us from the spot where Shino’d been standing.

I tried to dodge behind Naruto, but the bug attached itself to my jacket and crawled firmly under my collar. Out of respect for the fact that Shino was a bro who’d let me use him as a human shield in academy classes, I restrained my impulse to shudder and set myself on fire.

It was a near thing.

“Did you give them a clone?” Sakura asked, frowning after them.

“I can try and catch them up with one?”

“Or we can leave them to it and pick a different meeting point so we finish this without them,” Ino suggested sourly. By the way she was glaring down at her headband round her waist, I gathered that she’d got the kikaichu for Team Ten and wasn’t happy about it.

“They’re still Konoha,” Shikamaru said.

“Kiba’s an idiot and I can’t believe he made Hinata-chan shyer than she already was,” she retorted. “I didn’t even know that was _possible_.”

“We’re not changing the meeting place,” Sakura said. “Let’s just get these scrolls and finish the exam, ok?”

“And kidnap Hinata-chan after for a proper girl talk,” Ino agreed. “Sasuke-kun, you can come. You need a haircut.”

I flattened it defensively. It was fine. I then removed my hand and tried not to grimace, because eurgh, it really needed a shower. A cold stream in the morning was all very bracing but it lacked conditioner.

“Fine. See you later, Ino-pig.”

“And you from a mile off, Forehead.”

Hair was clearly on Naruto’s mind, because the trio of clones he tossed to Shikamaru to share out were all clips, one each for the deer, boar and butterfly cans. He waved with a cheery grin and I smirked as Shikamaru grimaced at his very elegant orange stag.

We moved quickly once we’d left, falling back into our trio-formation with a sigh of relief. The other two were still keeping me in the middle and I dropped the dark-eyes genjutsu over my sharingan, using it in short bursts to scan the trees for signs of anyone passing. 

In total, it took us less than half an hour to find a target. _God_ it was so much _better_ to be in a three again. Team Ten were ok, but if I never had to work with Team Eight again I’d be happy.

“Tsuki?” Naruto asked, turning to look hopefully at Sakura. She hummed consideringly.

“She’s not trained yet. I don’t think she can climb trees either.”

I snorted. “You totally want to call her,” I said, flashing her a teasing smirk. “Don’t lie, you know you do.”

She sniffed, dropping down to the forest floor with an exaggerated flick of her braid. “I suppose it would be good experience for her,” she said with a put-on air of reluctance. Naruto quietly cheered - I wasn't the only one in high spirits now that it was just us.

One bloody thumbprint to the back of the summoning scroll, a puff of smoke -

“Where’s the danger?” Tsuki yipped, leaping out and landing in a crouched position, the ridiculous fluff of her tail practically falling over her ears. “Who are we fighting? Get back Puppy, Tsuki and Sakura-bitch will save you!”

“I thought you were meant to be a tracker,” I said dryly, raising an eyebrow at her. She started circling round us, nipping at my and Naruto’s heels to try and push us closer in towards Sakura.

“My teeth are bigger than yours,” she retorted, baring them at me. 

“No fighting,” Sakura said firmly. I assumed she meant that Tsuki wouldn’t be fighting the other genin team, but given the quelling look she also sent me there may have been a second meaning. “Tsuki-chan, there’s an enemy team up ahead. They have something we need; Sasuke’s going to scout them out, can you show him the way? You can’t be seen.”

She paused, thinking through the instructions, then nodded decisively. “Cats are too lazy to track properly,” she said. “Kitten, follow me.”

“Too _lazy?_ ” I repeated, miffed. Cats weren’t lazy. They were ambush predators who knew how to conserve energy.

“Be nice,” Sakura muttered, too quiet for Tsuki to hear. “She’s young.”

“All the more reason to teach her good manners,” I replied, though it was more for show. It was hard to actually be annoyed by something as small and excitable as Tsuki, and even I wasn’t petty enough to hold a grudge against a puppy.

“Kitten!”

I pulled a face at the command, but went, following Tsuki high enough in the trees that I could keep an eye on both her and the surroundings. For a glaringly white fluff bomb she managed to blend surprisingly well into the undergrowth - except, of course, for the times she popped up to check I was following her, we’d have to work on that - but I was hardly going to risk her by being overconfident.

When we were close enough, I dropped down and landed silently next to her.

“You found them,” I murmured. “Now hide here until I get back, ok?”

She danced in place, ears up and forward. “There’s only three. We can take them Kitten, you and me, there’s only three of them.”

“Not without Sakura. Stay here - if I get in trouble, you need to run back and get help. We'll take them later when the others are here.”

She huffed but relented, burrowing herself under a patch of leaves and telling me to hurry up and not get caught. I tapped out an _affirmative_ in sign code, only half mockingly, and took to the trees again to circle round the other genin. The two boys out in front hadn’t noticed us yet - or if they had, they were double bluffing - and from the jagged line on their headplate I identified them as Kusagakure. I didn’t know much about Grass, other than that Orochimaru had originally chosen one of their teams to infiltrate as, and for a moment I paused, uncertain.

The girl trailed behind, red haired, glasses. She was looking back to where Tsuki was hiding and frowning, flicking an unsure glance up into the trees. I coiled my chakra in tighter, and held still. Could she have sensed…?

Whatever she’d felt, she shook it off. Maybe she’d found Tsuki but thought she was an actual dog, or an oversized caterpillar - there were plenty of creatures in the forest, and Tsuki was small enough that it would be a stretch to mistake her for a genin. Though if the grass kunoichi actually _was_ Orochimaru… No. No? No. Orochimaru wouldn’t dismiss something that could be a summons. Or put up with the girl’s other two teammates; one of the boys turned back to give a curt instruction, and she dutifully jogged a few steps to keep up. That, combined with the fact that she was a sensor, meant she most likely took a support role. As both the team’s early warning system and probably also weaker than the other two, it made her the most obvious target.

I wrinkled my nose. Kunoichi didn’t _have_ to be weaker. I was basing my assessment more on her slightly hunched posture and acceptance of being ordered around rather than her gender, and it didn’t _stop_ her being the obvious target, but. It annoyed me.

The two boys looked eerily similar, both more heavily muscled than me but less than Sakura, both with light armour and no visible way to tell what their specialisms were. One was spinning a kunai round his finger, but that didn’t mean much except that he owned a kunai.

For the scroll, I saw at least eight potential hiding places. Any of them could have it.

“Ok,” Sakura said when Tsuki and I came back to report our findings, two sparrow-shaped Naruto clones left to keep an eye on the Kusa team. “The most important thing is to split them up. Sasuke, can you take the girl by yourself?”

“If I can keep her hands still, then almost certainly,” I said, nodding. She’d not had the build for a close combat type, and if speed was her area I was fairly certain I had her beat - ninjutsu would be the biggest danger to watch for. “If Naruto sets up traps I can kawarimi her into them, it should be fine.”

“I’ll get her hands! I can jump up and bite them, it’ll be _easy_ , she’ll never see me coming -”

“No, Tsuki-chan,” Sakura said. “You’re our tracker, your job is to keep watch while we fight, not to get involved. Like you promised Pakkun, remember?”

“But _Sa_ kura-bitch -”

“No,” she repeated, firmly, dropping a hand onto Tsuki’s head to calm her. “We’re a pack, Tsuki-chan. We all do our part, and being our tracker is important. I need to be able to rely on you to do what I tell you so I can keep the whole pack safe, do you understand?”

As far as reprimands went it was about as mild as it got, but Tsuki whined miserably, her back legs bent as she tried to curve her curled-up tail underneath her. “‘M sorry, Sakura-bitch. I can do my job. I won’t fight. I promise.”

Over Sakura’s shoulder, Naruto was practically vibrating with the need to comfort her. _She’s a puppy,_ he mouthed to me, eyes shining, hands held up a fraction apart to indicate how tiny and puppyish she was. _Puppy, bastard. She’s so small._

 _You’re a wet blanket,_ I mouthed back, though it lacked any sting. Tsuki was, admittedly, very small.

“I’m not cross,” Sakura soothed. “It’s ok.” She looked up at the two of us a bit helplessly, clearly not sure how to proceed, then paused as she looked at me. “C’mon, Tsuki-chan,” she said with a smile that was _just_ this side of wicked, and I narrowed my eyes at her. “Are you going to set a good example for Sasuke-kun for me? He sometimes runs into battles that are too big for him too, you’ll have to show him how to be sensible.”

What. _What._ I hadn’t - _which_ of us please was the one who just dissuaded the pompom from trying to take on an entire team by ourselves? Battles that were - _what._

“Cats are hopeless at following orders,” Tsuki agreed, perking up again. “Watch, Kitten. You can do it.”

I made a strangled noise of protest. The other two just grinned at me like the idiots they were, and resumed planning the ambush. I allowed myself a pissy glare, then very deliberately put it out of mind and refocussed. Sakura had probably just said it to make Tsuki happy about following orders. Because I didn’t have any problems with battles that were too big for me. Obviously.

“You have wire?” Sakura asked Naruto. He shook his head sheepishly, but it wasn’t unexpected - he very rarely carried gear given that he made almost everything he used out of clones. I passed him a coil of mine with a raised eyebrow and he made a _yeah yeah_ grimace as he took it.

“I’ll pay you back,” he promised.

I bit back on the instinctive _you don’t have to_ that I wanted to say. It was something I’d learnt fairly early on in having Naruto to stay - he didn’t like having things if he hadn’t earned them. It applied to more than just money and I could take a stab at guessing why, but I wasn’t sure how to make him stop. It wasn’t impossible that he usually made wire out of clones because he couldn’t afford to buy it.

Or because the shopkeepers overcharged him. Because they were Konoha and Konoha were idiots. Mostly. I was keeping a list of exceptions.

“Just don’t let me get skewered,” I settled for saying. “If you leave me a clone to watch the trap I’ll do the rest, original you should stay with Sakura. And Tsuki,” I added, as the little dog puffed up at being left out.

Sakura pulled a face. “I don’t like not knowing how the two boys fight, but we’ll adapt as we go. See if a clone-team can draw them out enough to show a weakness before we attack.”

“Plan,” Naruto agreed, and dispelled one of his sparrow clones to get the memories. “They’re still going straight,” he said, pointing. “Not towards the tower though, so they probably only have one scroll.”

“Let’s hope it’s the right one then,” she said, grinning in anticipation, and we took off in pursuit.


	24. Chapter 24

The trap Naruto set was a simple one, and by the time we’d settled ourselves ahead of the Grass nin it was ready. I crouched on the branch, camouflage-henge blending me into the leaves, and watched them approach with my sharingan. It allowed me to predict their movements from far enough away that I could get into position without them noticing me, and I edged silently along the branches until I was directly above the route they were taking. Their sensor didn’t _seem_ to have picked me up before, and Ino had confirmed that I was hard to spot, but it would be stupid to be overconfident.

The boys passed me first. One, two, and I dispelled yet another orange clone to send a signal to Naruto and Sakura. Then, three - I dropped soundlessly out of the tree, landing squarely on the girl’s shoulders with a palm over her mouth and an elbow already hooking round her neck in a choke hold. She reached instinctively back to grab me but I shifted so I was pinning her arms against her sides with my knees, swinging us both down to the floor to knock her off balance as I did.

I switched before we hit the ground, replacing the log Naruto had set up for me - because he was a traditionalist about kawarimi, apparently - and triggering a small explosion of black and orange wire to reach up for us. The orange was henged clones, but it would hold just as well as the real wire would unless she could get free enough to stab it. Which wouldn’t be easy for her; not only had I stolen her weapon pouch as I pushed her forward into the trap, but her arms and hands were bound so tightly that she could barely move them.

“Got you,” the non-henged clone Naruto had left said triumphantly. I passed the weapon pouch to him (holy _fuck_ it was satisfying to do that to someone else for once) and stepped up behind the genin, kunai held lightly against her throat.

She twitched away from it, but wisely stilled as I pressed harder. I had a sudden flashback to Zabuza holding me in a similar position while I waited desperately for Kakashi to save me. It wasn’t a helpful flashback though, so I pushed it out of my mind.

“What scroll do you have?” I asked, deliberately keeping my voice blank and uninterested.

She didn’t answer. From what I could see of her expression I assumed she was glaring, though with the angle it was difficult to tell. I moved round to stand in front of her, changing my grip on the kunai to keep it digging in to her throat. The new angle allowed me to see her face and judge her reactions, and had an entirely unimportant side benefit of making me feel less like Zabuza while I threatened her.

“Fine,” I said, gesturing at Naruto with a hand signal to keep quiet and let me talk. “What scroll do your teammates have?”

Still no answer. She glanced between us, eyes wide behind her glasses and subtly trying to lean away from me. I sighed, feeling slightly over dramatic as I did so.

“Look, I’m trying to help you out here. If you have the same scroll as us, then there’s no point in any of this. Or, if _you’ve_ got the scroll, then I can let the others know to leave your teammates alone. See?”

Her gaze went to Naruto and I let a deliberately cold smile flicker over my face. Interrogation had never been my favourite class at the academy, but I’d still passed it - though I didn't need it to follow her thinking. Two of us here, and teams were usually three which would leave only one person going after the rest of her team, but on the other hand: “Konoha hunt in packs,” I reminded her. I didn’t know if she’d noticed our Rookie Nine alliance earlier, but even if she hadn’t we were famous for our teamwork. It was a decent bluff.

She hesitated, then clearly decided to go on the offensive. “Konoha’s weak,” she spat. “What are you going to do, Leaf? I’ll attack you if you untie me. If you leave me tied up, you can’t search me. Who the fuck designed this trap, it’s fucking useless.”

I suppressed a frown. Shit. She was, potentially, right - with so much wire wrapping round her, she was effectively mummified. We could release the wire slowly enough to retie it in a better position, but I wanted to get back to Sakura and the real Naruto.

Her anger was shifting to vicious confidence, and I was losing hold of the interrogation. I could feel the clone Naruto hovering unsurely behind me, and wished, not for the first time, that the original could as easily pass messages to his clones as they could to him. I ran through plans - I was _still_ fairly sure I could take her if it came down to taijutsu - and gambled on playing safe.

“You’re right,” I told her. She was kneeling, and I dropped into a crouch to put myself on eye level with her, resting the hand not holding the kunai on her head. “If we untie you, you attack us. It’s a problem.” I closed my fingers, gripping her hair tightly enough to hurt and silently apologising for it, and pulled to the side. “There’s an easy solution, though.” Without breaking eye contact I moved the kunai in my other hand, switching the grip until the point was resting against her throat and one twitch of my fingers would pull it through the artery in her neck.

I didn’t feel like Zabuza anymore. The genin’s pulse was thundering, visibly fast, and her eyes were wide with fear. Maybe her confidence had been bravado. I kept my own heartbeat deliberately steady.

“You’re Konoha,” she said. “Konoha wouldn’t.”

“I’m Uchiha,” I corrected. Maybe _my_ confidence was bravado. I didn’t know. I wasn't going to kill her, I just had to make her think I was. I’d never actually killed anyone before. No - a pig. I’d killed a pig. At the academy, we all had, it was part of the desensitisation training. And chicken and rabbits and fish, but the pig was the big one. They’d made a day of it, taking us to one of the farms just before the summer festival. The lady who ran the okonomiyaki stall gave each of us a free pancake as a thank you for the pork. I was the only one who didn’t eat mine. I swapped it with Chouji for a sugared apricot.

“So,” I continued, and my voice sounded distant and calm, more like Itachi’s than mine. “We’re looking for a scroll. What do you have?”

Her stare was fixed on my face, darting between each of my eyes as though I’d suddenly smile and tell her I was joking. I tracked each movement, and it was only when I accidentally saw the shadow of the veins on the back of her retina that I realised I had my sharingan active. That was fine though, I hadn’t taken the dark-eyes genjutsu off. It was fine.

“I don’t,” she said. “We were ambushed -”

“Lie,” I said, softly, almost apologetically. I could read it in the muscles of her face, tiny giveaways so subtle that she’d never think to control them.

“Shigeri has -”

“Lie.”

“You can’t -”

“Lie.”

She was panting, sweat gathering at the edge of her hairline. I could see the whites of her eyes stretching all round her iris. She was terrified. If I looked at her neck I could see the dent in her skin where it stretched over the end of my kunai, distorting the outline of an oddly bite-shaped scar.

“Kusa-san,” I said, gently, and now I sounded like Haku because Itachi had never been gentle with me. “What scroll do you have?”

She whined, high in the back of his throat, and I could see the effort it took not to try and shake me off. I waited, like marble, like stone, picturing Itachi’s ANBU mask over my face so clearly I could practically feel it against my cheeks.

“Earth,” she finally said, “Earth, we have earth - _please -_ it’s in my shirt, I swear, it’s earth, I won’t attack you. I won’t.”

“Thank you,” I said in my Haku-voice. I couldn’t tell if she was lying anymore; there wasn’t much point reading her involuntary muscle movements if all they were screaming was that she thought she was going to die. “You’ve been very helpful, Kusa-san.”

I withdrew kunai and spun it in my grip, slamming the blunt handle into her temple and catching her body as it slumped forward. I laid her out with efficient movements and spun the kunai again so I could use the blade to dispel the orange wire-clones, then looped my own wire around my fingers to coil it.

“Bastard?” the Naruto clone said hesitantly from behind me. I’d forgotten he was there.

“One second,” I said, politely, and tugged open the front of the unconscious genin’s shirt, careful not to expose her as I did so. The earth scroll was in a hidden pocket, exactly as she’d said, and I checked the seal with my sharingan to make sure it wasn’t disguised before I slipped it into my own pocket. “Can you let the others know we’ve got the scroll, please?” I said, standing up and turning to face him.

Halfway there, I felt his arms close around me. I tensed, but he’d managed to trap me in a position that I couldn’t stab him from, and he was holding too tight for me to kawarimi away.

“Not yet,” he said, dipping his head and trying to manoeuvre me so I was more closely tucked against him. “I’m giving you a hug.”

“Naruto -”

“Hush,” he scolded. “You did good, bastard. Now be hugged.”

I hovered on the edge, but - it was Naruto. It was _Naruto._ I let everything out in a shuddering breath, Haku and Itachi and Zabuza bleeding away as I leaned into him. His jacket was just as soft from the outside as when I was wearing it, and I buried my face in his collar.

“I wasn’t going to kill her,” I mumbled.

His hand came up, curving round the back of my head. “I know you weren’t,” he said, and he sounded so sure of it that I huffed a beat of strangled laughter, comforted and relieved and - but then I remembered that _good person_ meant something different to Konoha, and made a muffled noise of protest.

“We’re ninja. Killing people is what we do.”

“Only if they deserve it,” he told me. “We’re gonna be heroes, remember?”

“Yeah.” Heroes. Team Seven, who saved the universe, but when Naruto said it it sounded simple and straightforward and _right_ in a way it never did in my head. “Yeah,” I said again, and pushed back from him with a small smile. “Go tell the others I got the scroll, I’ll get her somewhere safe.”

He paused before he went, but was evidently satisfied that I didn’t need another hug and quirked a grin at me before dispelling himself. I turned back to the Kusa nin, surveying the small clearing we were in with a critical eye. People didn’t usually stay unconscious for more than a few minutes after a blow to the head, so I decided to hide her between the tree roots rather than stashing her up in the branches. Some loose knots around her hands that shouldn’t take too long to work out of, her weapon pouch tucked out of reach but easy to find, and a false surroundings genjutsu that would last until she woke up - she’d be fine. Short of staking a guard around her there wasn’t much more I could do, and while Kusa weren’t enemies they were hardly allies either.

I heard Sakura and Naruto coming before I saw them, barrelling through the forest with no attempt at subtlety, Tsuki a white streak at their feet. I frowned, shifting to full alert; Naruto should’ve got the message that I was fine, so unless one of them was hurt…?

I tried to subtly check Sakura for injuries when they landed, but she shook me off.

“You got the scroll?” she asked tersely, already turning to start running again.

“Safe,” I said, falling in behind her. “What’s happened?”

“Team Ten. Their clone dispelled, they need help.”

We landed on the edge of one of the more open areas of forest, the three of us crouched in the lower branches while Tsuki circled the base of the tree. Naruto had been able to tell us that they were facing a sand team and that Chouji was already down, but beyond that we were going in blind.

“What’s the plan?” he asked tersely, looking to Sakura.

“The plan is we get them out of there,” I said, leaning forward and fidgeting in place. We were delaying. Chouji was unconscious with enemies around - and even if he’d woken up, he wouldn’t be fighting at his best. Team Ten relied too much on teamwork. Ino and Shikamaru were defenseless without him. We needed to _go._

“Naruto, send clones forward with Tsuki-chan,” Sakura said. “Dispel them as soon as they get close and tell me what’s happening. Tsuki-chan,” and she didn’t raise her voice but she did tilt her head down, and Tsuki froze quivering in place to listen, “Take Naruto to the fight, then _stay hidden._ If it looks like you’re going to get hurt, go back to the summon lands. Understood?”

“Puppy, fight, hide. Understood!” She waited for the clones - tiny orange frogs - to hop down and grip her fur, then disappeared into the undergrowth, nose to the ground and ears pricked forwards to lock onto the sounds of the battle.

“I’ll go with them,” I said, already preparing to jump. “If I get to a safe place I can swap with whoever’s most in danger -”

“No.” Sakura made a harsh motion with her hand to emphasise her point. “Putting yourself at risk doesn’t help, it just makes another person in need of rescue.”

“But if they’re _injured_ -”

“Not until we know who we’re fighting,”

I turned on her, sharingan flickering on-off in my agitation. “We’re wasting time,” I pressed. They could be _dying_ , and she wasn’t letting me save them, there was a time for caution but now was _surely not it._

She glared back, jaw clenching. Her chainsaw blades were out, I noticed, one of them still bloodied from her recent battle. “We have to -”

“Ino’s got Chouji in the trees,” Naruto said, cutting across them. His eyes were closed, moving rapidly behind his eyelids as he tried to make sense of the memories he’d just received. “He’s out cold, but ok. I think. She’s bleeding - I can’t see clearly. Shikamaru’s on the ground, he’s fighting. He doesn’t look hurt.”

“And Suna?”

“Shikamaru has the two guys in his shadow. The girl is using jutsu, maybe wind? She’s trying to make him free them.”

“Ok.” Sakura nodded, shifting in place as she made and discarded plans at lightning speed. I crouched, gritting my teeth and willing her to think faster. “The girl’s on the ground?”

“Trees,” Naruto corrected.

“Fine. I’ll go underground, get at least one of the nin Shikamaru’s holding. Naruto, take the kunoichi - use your wind to disrupt hers. Keep her away from Ino and Chouji, send clones to protect them and follow Ino’s orders. Sasuke, target whoever you can with shuriken, but focus on the other guy on the ground. I’ll take closest, you take furthest. If you can get Shikamaru out _without risking yourself_ then do, but wait for me to attack while his shadows are still there.”

“Fab,” I said, and took off running. It was logical and it made sense; if the kunoichi was wind natured, then my throwing things at her wouldn’t do much. On the other hand, if she was too close to Ino and Chouji, or if she was succeeding in driving Shikamaru back, then I’d go after her anyway - wire and genjutsu could make easily wind users vulnerable, and with the right toxins even a glancing scratch from a shuriken would be enough.

I got there only a few seconds before the other two, but Naruto’s clones were already there; he’d unhenged the remaining frogs and sent them swarming up the trunk of a tree almost big enough to be a Hashirama. Their target was a blond kunoichi, one who was dispatching the clones with almost lazy waves of a wind-chakra fan and an amused smile.

I flicked my gaze down to Shikamaru to check he’d be ok for a second, catching on one of the Suna nin - dark clothes, something large and bandage-wrapped on the ground beside him - then to where Shikamaru was being -

I froze.

Shikamaru was being engulfed in sand. It was blocking his access to his shadows; in a second the dark-clothed nin would be free, along with - I turned my head to the last Suna nin.

Gaara.

Now that I knew he was there, I could feel his chakra, coarse and rough against my skin. It was aimed at Shikamaru, not at me, but it was also big enough that it spilled out over the whole area, and I pulled my own chakra deeper inside my skin to escape it. That and the time I’d spent hesitating cost me my few seconds lead over the other two though, and Sakura and Naruto exploded onto the scene, Sakura leaping out of the earth a fraction in front of Kankuro with a punch landing squarely in his solar plexus, Naruto and several more clones appearing around Temari in a cloud of bunshin smoke.

The sand closed around Shikamaru enough that he lost his grip on Gaara, and Gaara shook himself as he regained control of his limbs. He didn’t need them, not for his sand, but he still raised a hand and started curling his fingers into a fist. In front of him Shikamaru was trying to blast himself out with an earth jutsu of some sort. The sand was up to his waist, creeping over his chest and reforming wherever he tried to cut it away.

And, maybe, just slightly, I panicked. Kawarimi was out because sand _,_ genjutsu wouldn’t work because _sand_ , couldn’t attack Gaara because _fucking sand_ \- which left one thing in my arsenal, my safety blanket that I could do in my sleep with one handseal and an icecube of water chakra:

“Bubblehead no jutsu!”

Look. I _panicked._

I also dropped directly onto Shikamaru’s shoulders and slammed the dog seal onto the top of his head, blowing hard enough that the bubble of solid water chakra encompassed not only his face but also most of his rib cage. It pushed against the sand, trying to force it back with the power of my single lungful of air, and I kept blowing until the entire of Shikamaru’s torso was covered with a shimmering chakra barrier.

“ _Sasuke?_ ” he said, the word coming out garbled through the jutsu.

“Shallow breaths,” I told him, only vaguely hysterically. “You’ve got ninety seconds, Nara. Don’t waste them.”

The sand was already testing the edges of the barrier. Hell. There was, maybe, a centimetre of air between Shikamaru’s skin and death by Shukaku, and a _bubble_ was the only thing in the way. _Hell._

“You said I could kill people,” Gaara accused, sounding miffed.

I stared at him. Sakura, who appeared to have put her fist through Kankuro’s puppet and was now forcing him to the ground with his arm nearly dislocated, stared at me. Naruto and Temari were behind, I don’t know what they did, but the sudden silence was suspicious.

Gaara raised his chin belligerently. “Mother wants his blood. His death will prove I’m alive.”

Under my knees, Shikamaru’s shoulders were barely rising and falling with each breath. I scrambled to understand what Gaara was talking about and came up with the memory of crawling out the river and being involuntarily subjected to his backstory.

“I said you could kill people I didn’t like,” I said slowly, eyeing Gaara warily and trying to work out what I’d do when this conversation broke down.

“You don’t like him. I saw you before the exam. He sucks and he’s a bitch and you detest him.”

“Oh my god,” Shikamaru mumbled.

Honestly, I agreed with him. I didn’t know which bit was worse - that Gaara was watching that closely, that he’d picked out Shikamaru as a target because I’d insulted him - fuck, had he deliberately tracked Team Ten down? Or was it chance, and he’d picked Shikamaru out as the lucky winner of a sand coffin because I’d already warned him off Chouji? Hell, maybe he was just after the scroll. You’d’ve thought he would’ve got one by now, but who knew. Who knew? I didn’t know. Holy fuck.

A slight pressure brought me back to the present, like dry heat and sandpaper against my skin. Gaara was flaring his chakra again, growing more frustrated the longer it took me to answer, and there was a limit to how far I could draw mine back to escape it. The others were still silent, Kankuro and Temari staring at Gaara, Sakura and Naruto - I assumed, I didn’t take my eyes of Gaara to check - staring at me. Which wasn’t necessary. I mean. In fairness to them, I was casually talking to an enemy with an overpowered attack that had very nearly killed Shikamaru, but in fairness to me, Gaara was being weird, so.

Also in fairness to me I’d’ve struggled to tell anyone about the late night conversation we’d had about love and who he was allowed to kill without also admitting that I’d been out late at night impersonating ANBU and lying to the Kazekage. _So._

“Gaara,” I started, then floundered. “Gaara, that’s not - no. That’s. I mean, I did say that, but also, no.”

He gave me one of the most impressive bitch-faces I’ve ever seen. The black eyes really highlighted the prissy factor. “You make no sense,” he complained.

“No, I know. Um.” I had a wild idea for how to solve this, but also very little belief that it would actually work. Still, the bubblehead was running out of time, and I couldn’t think of anything else, so…?

“I like him,” I said. Then fought the urge to curl up and die, because wow, that sounded direct. “He’s ok. I mean. As a friend. Ly acquaintance. Look, you can kill people, but you can’t kill him. Or anyone else on his team. Or my team. Or the other team we were hanging out with. Or the team with the person in green spandex.”

Was that everyone? Oh.

“You can’t kill my sensei either, he has really bad hair and only one eye. Most of the time.”

He frowned at me unhappily. “Anyone else?” he asked sourly. “Is all of Konoha off limits?” It wasn’t asked in the tone of voice of someone ready and willing to comply, and also I wasn’t actually that fussed, so I waved him off.

“No, Konoha’s fine,” I said. “I only care about parts of it.”

In the background, Naruto made a strangled sound. Oops. I should maybe not let him dwell on that.

“Deal?” I offered, and held out my hand. I’d vanished the kunai first, but he still flinched back from it, sand rising defensively around him, and I blinked. “It’s a handshake,” I said, confused. Did they not shake hands in Sand? I knew he grew up isolated, but he must still have watched other people. He just continued looking at my hand warily though, so I awkwardly transitioned into rubbing the back of my neck in a gesture shamelessly copied from Naruto. Given that my usual array of body language was developed for the purpose of _avoiding_ straight forwardly honest conversations like this, Naruto’s would have to do.

The motion of it tilted my head down enough to realise that Shikamaru’s breathing had moved from suppressed-in-the-face-of-danger to suppressed-because-where-the-fuck’s-the-oxygen, and I remembered the time limit with a sudden start. “Deal later,” I said, hopping off his shoulders in agitation. “Can you just let him go for now? He’s running out of air.”

“I’m not killing him,” Gaara pointed out. “If he dies now, he’ll validate your existence, not mine.”

Should I just cancel the bubble anyway? The sand was level with his chin, and I could feel it pressing against my chakra. If I dropped it, would Gaara stop before he was crushed? This would be a lot easier to predict if I knew _why_ Gaara was so insistent on talking to me.

“I validate in other ways,” I said. Fuck it. Being demanding had worked before. “ _Now_ , Gaara.”

And being demanding worked again: the sand hovered in place for another long second then retreated, and I practically slammed the inverse dog seal into Shikamaru’s chest to release him. He gasped, shoulders heaving as he fought to breathe, and I tucked myself under his arm to keep him upright.

“Wait,” Temari said. “That’s _it?_ You’re letting him go?”

I was looking at Shikamaru rather than Gaara so I missed what expression he made, but his voice was cold when he replied.

“Enough. We’re done here.” The sandy feeling of his chakra returned, pressing in hard enough that Shikamaru flinched, and I glanced at Gaara quizzically. He was glaring up at the trees - presumably at Temari - and his expression was drawn and dark.

He looked, oddly enough, like a deranged killer with a demon inside him who hadn’t got a decent night’s sleep in his entire life and was liable to go on a murder spree. Not because it would bring him joy. Just. Because.

… Ok, Sakura and Naruto’s silent staring made a lot more sense now. It was easy to remember _in theory_ that Gaara was unstable before Naruto saved him, but it was a lot harder to keep in mind when he was being so damn _talkative_.

“Kankuro,” he said sharply, turning to walk away. Temari leapt down to follow him, idly reaching back to crush whatever small orange thing Naruto’s clone had henged into to try and hide on her back, and Sakura stepped back to let Kankuro go.

He rubbed his shoulder, glaring at her as he collected Karasu. Sakura, to my surprise, didn’t glare back. She was shaking, knuckles white, muscles frighteningly tense. Gaara’s chakra, I realised. It felt bad to people who weren’t chakra-blind. Shikamaru, half slumped over my shoulder for support, was equally out of commission - though when I glanced up to the tree I saw that Naruto was up with Ino and Chouji, crouching in front of them and frowning unhappily down at Gaara.

He didn’t seem affected, at least.

Team Eight, also - I hadn't noticed them arrive but they were loosely arrayed behind him, and though they were warily still, they didn’t seem quite as frozen as Sakura and Shikamaru did. They were quite high up, though.

There was a long silence after the Sand siblings left. I busied myself with setting Shikamaru down against a tree, checking him for injuries and refusing to make eye contact. I may, in a roundabout way, have nearly got him killed by insulting him before the exam. It was too bizarre to make me feel guilty or responsible, but awkward, awkward I could definitely manage.

“What,” he finally croaked, “the fuck.”

“Um,” I replied eloquently, and decided to splint his ankle. It wasn’t broken. Probably not even sprained. Just badly bruised, pretty much that entire leg was, and the splint wasn’t really necessary. I just. Wanted to do something with my hands.

“Sasuke,” Sakura said, voice tight with - something, and I hunched my shoulders and kept wrapping bandages round his leg. They needed to be tight enough to keep pressure on it for the bruises. Maybe I should take the splint out, splints weren’t actually useful for bruising, and though the bandages were from my supplies the splint was a stick that happened to be on the ground. It probably wasn't straight enough to help anyway.

“How’s Chouji?” I asked instead. “Akimichi, sorry. And Yamanaka. Naruto said she was bleeding.”

Ino snorted in the background, close enough that she must’ve dropped down from the tree while I was distracted. “You like us enough to talk that guy down for us, you call us our first names,” she said, in a way that allowed no room for argument. “Geez, when Chouji said you told him off last time - _shit_ , Sasuke-kun. How the hell. Can you teach me?”

“Um,” I said again, and tried subtly to look under my arm and see if she was dodging the bleeding question because she was on the verge of dying or because it wasn’t important. She rolled her eyes and shifted her grip on Chouji to lift the hem of her top and show a crude but effective gauze patch fixed over her side.

“ _Sasuke,_ ” Sakura repeated. I finished the bandage off with the neatest, most precise tucked-under ends that I could, and wondered if I should apply a second layer. Shikamaru rolled his eyes at me and kicked my knee gently with his other foot to push me off. He seemed steadier now, though still pale and shaken.

“Sorry for suffocating you,” I said, fingers twisting together awkwardly now I’d run out of first aid to keep them busy. “I panicked, it was the only thing I could think of.”

“No worries,” he said dryly. “I frequently use assassination jutsus on people when I panic.”

I opened my mouth to deny that’s what it was, then faltered and closed it again. It… kind of was, actually. When used on another person like that. Huh. “Oh,” I said instead.

He kicked me again, and I looked up. “Thank you,” he said, holding my gaze in a way that was uncomfortably sincere. “Now go talk to your team.”

I pulled a face on instinct. “Stop telling me what to do. You’re still not my team leader.”

“No,” Sakura said from behind me. “That would be me. What part, please, of get Shikamaru out _without risking yourself_ did you fail to understand.”

And maybe, I’d been keeping secrets. Maybe I felt guilty about that - even though I hadn’t done it on purpose. Maybe I’d gone off-plan in a way that, against any other enemy, would potentially have been disastrous. But _maybe also_ it had turned out fine?

“The part where I figured it was more important to save his life?” I suggested sarcastically, turning to face her with a belligerent scowl. “It worked, didn’t it? Everyone’s fine. What’s the problem?”

“You can’t keep putting yourself in danger like that!”

“We’re ninja!” You’re also _twelve._ Shikamaru’s twelve! I got that she was scared, but that didn’t give her carte blanche to take it out on me - hell, the only reason she was team leader in the _first place_ was because I’d given her the position back when we started out. 

No, that was unfair. She’d more than earned the role since then. But _still._ I had more important things to think of, and it wasn’t like I’d _asked_ Gaara to take an interest in me.

“Bastard, he was dangerous,” Naruto cut in, standing between us and shooting Sakura a quelling look. “You know that, right? He was… He wasn’t a normal genin.” 

I glared, then ran what he said through my head again and faltered. Was Naruto - was he fumbling his way through warning me off Gaara because he was a jinchuuriki? But. _Naruto_ was a jinchuuriki. My confusion must’ve shown on my face because Sakura gave a bitter huff of laughter.

“He didn’t know,” she said, I’m not sure who to. “He didn’t know. Of course he didn’t know.”

“I knew,” I defended. I looked to Naruto for support, but he was biting his lip and fighting not to look - I don’t know. Sad. Frustrated? He was doing too good a job of fighting for me to guess. “Oh for fuck’s sake,” I hissed, sitting back on my knees. “What’ve I screwed up now.”

“You haven’t screwed up,” Naruto promised. “You just worried us. The Suna nin was sending killing intent at you and you just kept talking to him.”

“Because you have _no survival instinct_ ,” Sakura moaned behind him, tugging on her braid. “Because I look away for _one damn second_ and now you’ve made friends with _someone else_ who’s trying to kill you.”

“He wasn’t going to kill me,” I protested. She didn’t seem to notice.

“What, are you going to kawarimi into certain death for this one too? Should I commission an entry on the memorial stone? _Uchiha Sasuke, this dumb fuck saw a snail be sad and offed himself -_ ”

“ _Sakura_ ,” Naruto hissed. She threw her hands up in a universal gesture of _fuck this shit I’m out_ and stormed off to angrily inspect a bush. I left her to it and turned back to Naruto.

“Shikamaru didn’t die,” I said, fighting to keep my voice level. “Ino and Chouji didn’t die. Shall we ask them if I did the right thing?”

“Hey,” Shikamaru protested from where he was still leaning against the tree next to me. “I appreciate the first name, but this is a Team Seven thing.”

I shifted my glare to him and he shrugged innocently and without any remorse. Taking my eyes off Naruto though was a mistake, because it gave him time to be heartbreakingly sad in my general direction.

I double took. “What?”

“Bastard,” he started, but stopped as both Shikamaru and I shifted to subtle high alert. Over his shoulder, Sakura had stood up from the bush, fingers tapping out an alarmed _enemy imposter enemy imposter_ on her thigh. I caught the briefest flash of white fur - Tsuki. I hadn’t realised she was still here; she must’ve stayed hidden the whole time.

“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you about Gaara,” I said levelly, signing back _received_ and _where_. Shikamaru was wounded - and also understood the Konoha tap-sign - so it was unlikely to be him, and I challenged anyone to impersonate Naruto. “I honestly didn’t think it was that big a deal when Chouji and I met him. I told him not to attack and he didn’t, same as this time.” Chouji was conscious now, but woozy, leaning against Shikamaru to stay sat up; that could easily be a cover for someone not sure how he usually acted. Ino had picked up Shikamaru’s tension and not so subtly moved into a ready position, one I recognised from her training with us.

“Yeah, but the killing intent,” Naruto returned, equally levelly, lifting his arms to cross them behind his head.

He really needed a less obvious tell for when he was making clones.

But if the imposter wasn’t in Team Seven or Team Ten, that left Team Eight; Shino and Hinata were hanging back, as usual, Kiba was hovering awkwardly near Ino and Chouji with Akamaru in his customary position on his head. Could Byakugan see through henge? If Hinata hadn’t spotted the change, did that mean it was her?

 _Eight,_ Sakura signed, trying to nonchalantly move to a better position. Great. Really helpful.

But Shino had his bugs, and Kiba had Akamaru - any of them would be able to spot the imposter. If one of us had been swapped, maybe, because they wouldn’t know us that well but how the hell would you slip a fake into their team?

You didn’t. You took the whole team.

“I don’t feel killing intent,” I said distractedly, still - barely - keeping up the charade of the conversation with Naruto. “Not really a thing for me.”

“You don’t _feel -_ ”

Sakura burst out the ground under Hinata, the her that was edging round behind dissolving into an illusion bunshin. She slammed her fist into Hinata’s stomach, chainsaws spinning, and the rest of us took that as our cue.

 _Left_ I signed to Naruto, darting between fake-Shino and fake-Hinata. Without knowing who we were fighting there was nothing to tell us who the best match up for who was, but Naruto’s clones were better placed for fake-Kiba and fighting fake-Shino put me closer to Sakura; with any luck she’d dispatch the Hinata replacement and take over the close quarters so I could fall back and provide support.

Though from the way Hinata was twisting bonelessly around Sakura’s punches, luck didn’t seem to be much on our side. I vaguely registered Ino darting in to help her and Shikamaru’s shadow shooting forward to hold Shino, but narrowed my concentration and left the others to their own fights. I had to trust that they’d be ok, or that they’d shout if they needed me; I couldn’t afford to be distracted.

My first taijutsu attack was fast, kunai in my fist and just enough of a henge over me to blur my movements. Between that and Shikamaru, Shino didn’t even have chance to dodge - my fist went straight through his windpipe, kunai tearing at his neck as it went. I had a second of horrified disgust, then had to scramble back as the mud he was made of tried to reform around my wrist and hold me in place.

“Clone,” I spat, landing in a crouch out of reach. “I fucking _hate_ clones.” Naruto got a pass for being Naruto, everyone else who used clones could go die in a ditch and I’d happily spit on their remains. I hadn’t come across an earth clone before, but if it could survive having its throat torn out - decapitation maybe? Kunai were too short, I didn’t have a big enough weapon for that. “Naruto!” I said, dodging the miniature geyser of mud that Shino shot at me from the dripping mess that used to be his arm. “I need a - _hnnk._ ”

My hands flew up to my neck. It was like an electric shock almost, powerful enough to make my muscles seize up in pain. My jaw clenched shut and my heart raced; I hadn’t seen the clone do anything, but this felt like a paralysis jutsu and they usually needed contact so how - _fuck,_ the bug, Shino put a tracker bug on me when we split up. Had he already been swapped out then? No. He couldn’t have been. Could he?

“Ino,” I choked out, fighting against the paralysis. She had the other bug. “Ino, the - _rkk._ ”

“That’s enough of that,” fake-Kiba said pleasantly, dropping an arm round my shoulders. I pulled on my chakra, reaching up behind me with a tendril of it and trying to dislodge the bug - fake bug, it had to be another fake. “As fascinating as this is, I think we have better things to do. Don’t you, Sasuke-kun?”

 _Got it._ I ripped it out from under my collar and delivered a vicious kick to Kiba’s knee, kawariming out of reach as soon as I was free. It was a messy landing with my muscles still shaking from the aftershocks, but it gave me a breather to assess the battle. Shikamaru had Shino in his shadow; Sakura and Ino together were still fighting Hinata, though from the mud that had replaced half her torso she was another clone. Naruto was occupied with Akamaru, or what used to be Akamaru; the little dog had stretched and grown, almost like a giant - snake. Giant snake.

“Manda,” I whispered to myself, and looked at the fake-Kiba with new, wide eyes. “Orochimaru.”

“I was wondering when you’d spot me,” he said, delighted. “I’m fascinated. Did you learn the name of every boss summons, or are we snakes just special?”

I couldn’t answer. I couldn’t _think._ Team Ten were already hurt. Chouji was barely conscious, with only a wounded Shikamaru between him and the battle. Team Eight were - dead? Things I should’ve seen were racing through my head; Kiba had been Orochimaru from the beginning, from when we first entered the forest and I hadn’t noticed. I hadn’t - Hinata and Shino _literally never spoke_ and I hadn’t noticed. Stupid. _Stupid._ I’d known I shouldn’t have involved them, I’d _known_ it wasn’t safe and I did it anyway, I let Naruto and Sakura talk me into staying with them to keep them safe and now they were - it was _Orochimaru -_

I didn’t have time for recriminations. I didn’t have time to think of a new plan either, so I defaulted to my original one. Dark eyes genjutsu on, sharingan activate, look away, find the furthest thing I could see and latch onto it -

“Don’t tell me you’re the sort to run,” Orochimaru said, frowning in distaste. “After all that time spent profiling you, now you’re trying to prove me wrong? I pretended to be a teenage boy for you Sasuke-kun, the least you could do is appreciate it.”

I frequently pretended to be a teenage boy but you didn’t see me looking for approval. I crouched as subtly as I could, trying to time myself so he wouldn’t be able to duck.

“Sasuke,” Shikamaru said urgently, darting a glance between me and Orochimaru. “Don’t -”

I jumped. Orochimaru leant back, spine bending more than a spine ought to do so he could slide under me, but that was fine; I twisted, pulling myself towards him with my chakra arms and changing my trajectory mid air. I gave myself just enough time to grip onto him when we collided then kawarimid, and again when we landed, and again to get as far away as possible, tearing blindly through the forest and swapping with the first thing I could see.

He twisted away from me before I could switch a fourth time and I staggered back, light headed from the strain but still desperate enough for a last switch of just me. It wasn’t far; I landed high up in the trees, but close enough that I could easily see him even without my sharingan. I covered myself in the most complete false-surroundings I could spare the chakra for then hunkered down against the bark and focussed on catching my breath as quietly as I could.

Down on the ground, Orochimaru laughed.

“To think,” he said in a musing, high-pitched voice that was clearly designed to carry. “I almost dismissed you, Sasuke-kun. No sharingan, no flashy skills - you’ve done a remarkable job of blending yourself into the background. You know, I almost believed you were the weakest member of your team? Such a disappointment. All that potential, wasted on someone with no drive to improve.”

I couldn’t help but flinch at that. Being unremarkable enough that Orochimaru had almost ignored me was what I’d been aiming for, but wasting potential hit too close to my fears of what Danzo would think of me. The tightrope between the two felt like an impossible line to walk at the best of times, and just then I had the sinking suspicion I’d failed both sides.

“But that’s not your style, is it Sasuke-kun?” he continued. He sounded closer; I didn’t move to check. The false surroundings should hide me either way, but it’d hide me better if I helped it out, and movement was easy to spot. I didn’t need it to hold for a long, I just - a moment, I just needed a moment, my chakra was shaky, bitingly jagged and hard to control, I just needed my thoughts to stay still for a second so I could hold onto it and kawarimi out. It would be easier if I dropped the genjutsu but the genjutsu was the only thing keeping me safe, so I’d have to find a way to do both, which I could, I just - just give me a _moment -_

“I have to commend you; the way you removed my genin from the written exam was impressive. Not flawless, I could make you so much more, but… Impressive.” His voice moved, switching suddenly to the other side and further away. A trick? Or had he moved that fast? “You’ll have to tell me who taught you. Was it the same person who warned you I was coming? Your brother was good at genjutsu, but something tells me you wouldn’t accept his help. Who are you hiding, Sasuke-kun?”

 _Go away,_ I begged.

“And you stared down a jinchuuriki! I can’t decide - impressive again? Or foolish? You don’t feel killing intent, you don’t feel fear…” I sensed the movement of air a second before his jutsu tore through my tree and threw myself into a panicked kawarimi again to escape. It cost me my illusion and I barely had chance to reorientate myself or work out where I’d gone before the ground reached up to snare my feet; I leapt, dodging that and spinning under the sword that rose to block me. Another kawarimi - my eyes were hurting, I should turn the sharingan off but if I did I wouldn’t be able to react in time but if I didn’t I’d run my chakra dangerously low - and I dodged again, then gambled and came in fast, lashing out with a wire-wrapped shuriken in an attempt to clear an escape path -

The shuriken scored a deep slash across fake-Kiba’s chest, and Orochimaru burst out of it, pinning me against a tree and winding me in the same movement as his disguise dissolved into mud behind him. I brought my feet up in an immediate reaction to kick him off and swallowed a scream of frustration at the snakes that tangled around them, dragging them down and holding them in place.

“But you know, you need fear, Sasuke-kun,” He continued as if he hadn’t been interrupted. “How will you ever activate your eyes without it?”

“I was planning not to,” I spat. The fact that I currently _had_ my eyes activated, with only a thin layer of genjutsu between them and someone who very much wanted to take them from me - or, worse, take me with them - was something I couldn’t afford to think about just then.

Orochimaru hummed, ignoring me. “Perhaps I can help,” he said, retrieving my shuriken from where it was stuck in his chest and not even twitching as it came loose. “Fear is just a combination of chemicals in the brain, it can’t be too hard to mimic it.”

“What -” I struggled, but his grip was too firm and there was nothing I could do to stop him lifting the shuriken to my face. He held it delicately, almost like a calligraphy brush, and pressed one of the sharp points into the soft skin under my eye. I reared instinctively back, slamming my eyes closed and deactivating my sharingan.

“Hush,” he chided. “You get one, I get one, we’ll see who activates it first. I can even give it back when we’re done, make sure you’ve got a matching set.”

“No,” I said, forcing my head back into the tree to frantically try and get away. It didn’t work and his fingers tugged insistently at my eyelids to open them, the shuriken digging in deep enough to be painful. “No, no non _ono_ -” It was going to, the pressure, he was -

“Mother felt your fear,” a new voice said, and Orochimaru leapt back to avoid the wall of sand that tried to crush him. I tore myself free of the tree, only noting the snakes that had been holding me as much as I needed to escape them, kawariming up to the branches in a ragged, panicky switch.

“Oh god,” I gasped, huddled in as tight a ball as I could make with my face pressed into my knees and my arms crossed firmly over my head. “Oh god, oh my god.” I might have been crying, but it was hard to tell if the stinging was from tears or from the residual pain of Orochimaru nearly - of my eye - “No no no Aniki, you weren’t meant to let this happen, oh my _god._ ”

I couldn’t stop though. Crying was for people who weren’t a handful of metres away from a jinchuuriki-sannin showdown, and I honestly didn’t know if Gaara would even win. Nor did I know how far away he’d been or why he’d decided to come and investigate, maybe he’d stayed close after I’d sent him away earlier, maybe I’d accidentally brought Orochimaru to him with my wild switches to get him away from my team.

It didn’t matter. I was letting my brain run away with the question as a distraction because I didn’t want to uncurl from my safety position just yet, but having my arms over my head wasn’t actually going to do anything to protect me. I counted my breaths against my heartbeat enough to ascertain that both were going too fast, but at least breathing in for four beats gave me enough oxygen to get a grip, and unfolded myself.

Gaara and Orochimaru were almost directly below me. I hadn’t even been hidden, just far enough over their heads to be out of their way. The ground was strewn with a puddled mix of sand and water, some of it still sluggishly moving as Gaara tried to control it. He was standing his ground though, more sand swirling round him from his gourd and his face impassive as he alternated blocking Orochimaru’s mud attacks and sending sand bullets of his own back.

“As fascinating as this is,” Orochimaru said, sounding annoyed for the first time, “I’m afraid I’m not a fan. Demons are just _messy._ ”

He held a hand out, palm up with the fingers splayed, and lit each fingertip with a flare of chakra. I leant forward, panic pushed aside by a new fear as I recognised the movement as priming a seal.

“Gaara, move! You can’t block that!”

He didn’t answer and he didn’t move, but his sand did start rising up to encase him in a protective sphere. Too slow, and Orochimaru was already darting in; I had a brief moment to despair and be thankful at least that no one from Team Seven was there to watch me make exactly the same stupid mistake again but if Orochimaru messed with Gaara’s seal enough to let Shukaku out then I was dead anyway and at least dead was better than -

I switched. Gaara stumbled as he was forcibly relocated to the tree, and I landed low and already running to get away, but Orochimaru was faster. His hand slammed into my left elbow, leaving that entire arm numb. Gaara’s sand closed around me a second later, completing his spherical shield and barely missing crushing Orochimaru’s arm as it did so. It buried my legs, my hips, sand pouring in around me in an impenetrable barrier that I couldn’t kawarimi out of even if I tried.

So I didn’t. You can’t keep throwing yourself into danger and be surprised when there are consequences.

Maybe I could’ve fought it. Forced it back with a bubble. Immolation jutsu, raised my body temperature so much I melted the sand to glass and hoped Gaara backed off before I set myself on fire. Yelled at him. But.

You can’t keep throwing yourself into danger. You can’t keep panicking like you’re limitless, like you won’t run dry if you burn everything being afraid. Inside the sand where there was no way out it felt pointless. It was just a waste of energy. What’s the point of trying if there’s nothing you can do.

The sand was at my waist.

“Yeah,” I said with a bitter laugh, lifting my right hand to rest against it. My left was hanging uselessly; I couldn’t move it, or feel the sand against it. “I don’t know what I expected either.” 

I hated being a ninja sometimes. A lot of the time. The training was fun, d-ranks were ok, I was glad I had my team.

But being a ninja was a constant battle between saving myself or saving other people, there were no right choices and the wrong ones hurt, and I hated it.

I hated it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Whelp. *jazz hands*
> 
> Sakura: are you going to kawarimi into certain death for this one too  
> Sasuke: no but actually yes


	25. Chapter 25

I liked sand. There was a garden behind the family shrine, not very big, walled off in a quiet courtyard. The back porch of the shrine overlooked it, and I used to sit on the edge with my knees through the railings and my legs dangling into space, curling my toes and daring my sandals to fall off my feet. That had sand. It wove between miniature rocky mountains and carefully pruned trees to mimic the Naka river, and the lines the rake left in it looked like ripples along the surface of the water.

I don’t know how long I spent in Gaara’s sand coffin. It didn’t crush me; the sand got as far up as my waist and stayed there, pressing against my back enough to keep me upright but leaving free space in front of me. When I rested my hand on it I could feel it moving, shifting restlessly, but it never came in closer, and if there was anything still going on outside I couldn’t tell. Not that I tried particularly hard.

“You can’t use all sand for a garden,” I said, continuing with the story. “Not unless it’s inside. It blows away. You have to use gravel as well. And there’s no flowers. Flowers die, that’s not what the garden’s for, so you have moss and trees. But little trees. Otherwise they look wrong.”

I poked a finger at the wall in front of me. My left hand was still unresponsive, so I awkwardly used my right to try and trace a picture. Ninja had to be ambidextrous enough to use weapons, but I’d never trained it to draw.

“It’s the mountain,” I said when I was finished. “Before they carved faces in it. They changed its shape to make space for the things they wanted to build, but the one in the garden still looks like it used to.” At least, it did in my memory; I hadn’t been back to the shrine much. The trees were probably too big for the scene they were mimicking and I doubted the sandy gravel was as white as I remembered anymore, but. My garden was closer. I liked my flowers, even if they weren’t as enduring and eternal as a rock garden was meant to be. They were colourful.

The sand started pulling back and I gripped onto it instinctively. It paused and I let go, shaking my head at myself. “Sorry. You don’t have to stay. I mean - I should go. The others are probably looking for me.”

I couldn’t hide forever. I had to be a ninja again, be the last Uchiha again. Face the fact that life went on and surviving one near-death experience didn’t mean there wouldn’t be others, that for all I knew Orochimaru would be waiting to resume as soon as I stepped out to meet him. Face my _team_ again after I split from them when they told me not to, after I missed that Kiba was Orochimaru and screwed up and put them all in danger.

I didn’t even know if they’d survived facing Manda. They had to have. Had Team Eight? I didn’t want to think about it. Sakura had already been pissed at me for Gaara. No, that wasn't fair - she hadn’t been pissed, she’d been worried. Not that that changed things much, and selfishly, I wished they wouldn’t care. Let me be a fuck up in peace. Stop making me feel bad about it.

I bit my lip, forcing the unhelpful thoughts away. “I’m ok,” I said, pushing gently against the sand until it started receding again. “I promise.”

He hesitated, but then the sand seemed to drain out, the sphere around me melting away until I was just standing in a forest with Gaara staring blankly at me. Orochimaru was nowhere to be seen; I wondered if he’d backed off immediately after Gaara ‘crushed’ me, or if they’d continued fighting while I was in the sand. Now that Orochimaru had shown he wanted me to activate my sharingan before giving me a curse seal, I didn’t really care. I’d kept my eyes hidden this far. Nearly hadn’t _kept_ them, but. Kept them hidden just fine.

“Thanks,” I said, at a loss for anything else to say. I felt like I should add more, but didn’t know what so I settled for an awkward wave and turned to go. I had a vague idea of what direction I’d come from during the panicked kawarimi-fuelled escape, hopefully Naruto and Sakura wouldn’t have strayed too far from where I left them.

“You’re not afraid anymore,” Gaara said suddenly. I looked back at him blankly, not sure what I was meant to say to that. He frowned, tilting his head as though working through a puzzle. “Because I didn’t kill you. But you weren’t afraid of me before, and I was going to kill you then.”

I laughed before I could stop myself, a brief and bitter sort of laugh that made me shake my head at the universe’s dark humour. “Glad to hear it,” I said dryly. Something about the fact that I’d just been rescued by someone who was broken enough that he didn’t know if he wanted to kill me or not was just so damn _funny_. I’d been so relieved to see him, and he had a history of trying to murder me. Hell, if I remembered right I’d only survived meeting him that first night because I’d kawarimid to the bottom of a river, and now I’d shared parts of my family with him that I’d never shown to other people. I don’t think I talked to _Plushie-tan_ even about the shrine and visiting it with my mother.

“So why were you afraid?” he continued, doggedly pursuing whatever point he was trying to make. “You said you’d tell me what it was later. It’s later. Tell me.”

God, did I? People who remembered conversations needed to chill the fuck out.

“It’s not always about someone trying to kill you,” I said, feeling the pressure to try and explain this right. If Gaara was going to pay attention to what I said, I needed to at least _attempt_ to make sense. “He was going to keep me alive.”

“But people want to be alive.”

I shook my head, distracted by my thoughts. “I mean, yes, but. When you die you stop, it’s not the only bad thing people can do to you. But that’s the big picture, the reason I was scared _then_ was…” I hunched in on myself, subconsciously cradling my bad arm closer. There was something horrible about this conversation, like being naked and exposing my weak points, and I wasn’t sure why I kept going except that Gaara had asked me to. “... I was scared because I couldn’t fight back,” I admitted. “I had no control, and I couldn’t stop it. I couldn’t keep myself safe.”

He was silent for a minute as he thought through that, and I kept my gaze on the leaf litter and deliberately forced my thoughts quiet. I already knew why I was scared. It was why I needed my brother, why my first plan for the forest had always been to speedrun it and get back to Kakashi, and there was no point going over it again in my head.

“Could you stop me?”

I shook my head again. “No,” I said honestly. “You’re a lot stronger than I am.”

He made an annoyed sound, his frown shifting to a glare and his sand swirling agitatedly around his feet. “So why aren’t you afraid of me?”

Who knew? Gaara’s murderous tendencies were more general, Orochimaru’s were targeted specifically at me? But Gaara had been following me closely enough to know that I’d argued with Shikamaru, and he kept showing up, so I could hardly claim to be a random bystander anymore. Naruto would make him see he wasn’t alone and Gaara would devote himself to protecting people instead of killing them? That hadn’t happened yet. He only wanted blood, he didn’t care about my eyes? Blood still meant dying.

I shrugged, helplessly. “I don’t know, Gaara. I trust you. I like sand. I don’t _know_.”

“Why not?”

“Why don’t you?” I shot back, frustrated. “Why do I have to? I’m a mess. Maybe not the same mess as you, but you keep expecting me to have the answers and I -” I cut myself off with an annoyed growl, forgetting my arm didn’t work and trying to run it through my hair. The growl was echoed by another one, then a third, just loud enough for me to hear but quiet enough that anyone who didn’t recognise it would dismiss the sound.

My heart leapt. _The dogs._

“My sensei’s coming,” I told Gaara, breaking into a relieved smile. “You should go.”

He didn’t. “When you swapped with me,” he said, staring too hard and not blinking, “You said I couldn’t block it.”

I blinked for him, then stifled a wince from the way it made my eye hurt. “You couldn’t. It wasn’t a physical attack, it was a seal. Even if you had sand armour you would’ve got hurt.” I shook my head, ears straining to identify the growls. Tsuki, Pakkun, Urushi, _Shiba -_ “Seriously, I can hear at least four dogs less than twenty seconds away. You need to go.”

“Did it hurt you?” he asked, still not moving. Fifteen seconds, and less if Uhei was there.

I lifted my dead arm, everything elbow and below flopping uselessly and numb. “My hand,” I said impatiently, eyes straining as I squinted through the trees. “ _Go._ ” Ten seconds, if that - I could hear their footsteps, that was Bull, I could hear _Bull._

He didn’t answer, and I glanced back over my shoulder. Nothing; he was gone, leaving only the most waterlogged dregs of sand behind. “Drama queen,” I muttered, then the dogs barrelled through the trees. 

“Kit _ten_ ,” Tsuki wailed, scrambling straight for my ankles. She hit me with enough force that I had to shift my weight forwards to not move from it, standing on her hind legs and pawing at my knees until I crouched down to her level.

“I’m ok,” I told her, trying to scritch behind her ears with my right hand. It was a lost effort; she was so determined to lick both my wrist and my face that her head didn’t stay still enough for petting. “I’m ok, it’s ok Tsuki. We’re good, we’re ok.”

The rest of the pack fanned out around us, Uhei and Urushi disappearing soundlessly into the trees while Shiba circled restlessly. Bull stood squarely behind me, his massive weight the most comforting thing I’d ever felt at my back, and I gave up trying to balance with Tsuki climbing on me in favour of collapsing against him.

“Puppy,” Pakkun started, trotting up with head and tail both held warily high. “What -”

“ _Sasuke,_ ” Sakura gasped, dropping down in front of me with Naruto following a beat after.

“I’m fine,” I said immediately, tilting my head back to try and keep out of reach of Tsuki’s tongue. “I’m fine, I’m ok, I’ve got my eyes. It’s good.” It was difficult to brace yourself when you had a lapful of wriggling puppy but I did it anyway. I fucked up, again, I did what I wasn’t meant to, _again,_ and even if Sakura didn’t see it I kawarimid myself into danger and even if I knew I deserved -

Her arms closed round my shoulders, nearly crushing Tsuki between us, and I froze.

“Um,” I said unsurely, leaning further back against Bull in an effort to take her weight. She squeezed tighter, face turned in against my neck, and shook her head. Over the back of her head I caught Naruto’s eye; he seemed to be holding his breath every time he breathed in and his expression was caught in an odd strained grimace that was in danger of falling apart at the edges.

“Give -” His voice wobbled, and he swallowed, swaying a half step back before trying again. “Give us a second, bastard.”

“You’re crying,” I said in disbelief. I’d never seen Naruto cry. I’d seen him get teary eyed, but. I kind of figured if he ever cried it would be loud and open like the rest of him, not forced down and hidden like this. I tried to look at Sakura for assurance and accidentally hit my chin against the back of her head, then registered the wet on my collar. “ _You’re_ crying,” I repeated, blinking at her braid. 

“Oh my god,” she mumbled.

I blinked again, then said plaintively, “Why are you both crying?”

“Puppy,” Pakkun said, flopping down by my feet. “They thought you died. Let them cry.”

Somewhere in the leaves Urushi barked a low-pitched all clear. Shiba kept circling, fur bristling and teeth bared, but Bull bent round towards me with a whuffing sigh that dropped drool in my hair and rearranged himself in a sprawled position on the ground, turned on his side with me and Sakura cradled against his stomach. Tsuki wriggled out from between us, kicking Sakura to my left side and claiming my lap as she did.

“You _left_ ,” she accused, standing on my chest to nip at my nose. “How can the pack protect the pack if the pack’s not there to be protected. Honestly. _Cats._ ”

“Sorry,” I said on automatic, still struggling to process. I’d expected to be told off. As far as dressing downs went, Tsuki’s was succinct, but not quite what I’d pictured. I looked to Naruto again for help but he’d progressed to gulping, raw breaths, still holding it for too long between every inhale to try and keep quiet.

“Hey,” I said, alarmed. “Don’t - you can cry. If you want to cry. Or, you don’t have to - are you ok? I’m ok. You don’t have to worry, I didn’t die. Um, do you want a hug? I have arms.” One arm, at least, and I lifted it awkwardly, elbowing Bull’s legs to move them aside and make space.

“Oh my god,” Sakura said again, but she hiccoughed it into a laugh. “Sasuke you _idiot_.”

I ignored her. It might not have been the smoothest thing I ever said, but it was enough to make Naruto scrub at his eyes and hesitantly lower himself down on my right side. He looked unsure and lost, and it was almost a relief to put my own problems aside to wonder if he’d ever had anyone hug him when he’d cried before.

Probably not, I thought, with a flare of old anger. I tugged insistently until he was mirroring Sakura’s position and closed my arm around him, wriggling to sit up straighter until I could tuck his head decisively under my chin. “I’m ok,” I said. “You’re ok. Everyone’s ok.”

Actually - I flicked a questioning glance to Pakkun.

“Akino and Guruko are with the other puppies,” he said, understanding what I wanted. “The girl can still fight, the other two are hurt but not badly. They’re safe.”

“Ino wants to be a healer,” Sakura added, turning so her words weren’t muffled against my shirt. “She doesn’t know much yet, but she’s good at first aid. We got the mud clones after you - left, and Naruto got the snake.”

I squeezed her shoulder, tactfully ignoring her stumble over the word left. “And the pack?” I asked. “Is Kakashi…?”

She shook her head. I swallowed, but refused to let myself be disappointed. I hadn’t really expected him to have somehow come charging through the trees. I just. Would have liked to see him, that was all.

“He’s outside the forest,” Pakkun said. “Bisuke’s with him, he sent the rest of us to Tsuki.” There was a huffed _bork_ from the trees and Urushi trotted out, dodging through Shiba’s restless patrol. “Bisuke and Uhei are with him,” Pakkun amended, nodding. “Uhei will have told him we found you.”

“You can do that?” I asked in surprise. “I didn’t think you could be summoned to another place.”

“I brought them,” Tsuki said, tail wagging briefly against my leg. “I told Pakkun and Pakkun told the big dog-man and the big dog-man got the big pack and I brought them to Sakura-bitch.”

“You did,” Sakura agreed, stroking her with a smile. “You were brilliant, Tsuki.”

“Of course I was,” she agreed, stretching further up my chest for better scritches. “I’m the best.”

I snorted, amused at her confidence. I don’t know if the ability to send the pack to us was why Kakashi had made sure Sakura had a summons before entering the forest or not, but I couldn’t deny that I was glad of it. With my team either side of me, big dog at my back and two little dogs on my chest and feet, plus Shiba and Urushi keeping guard - yeah. I was glad they were here.

We lapsed into a comfortable silence. Naruto still hadn’t let himself properly cry, but his shoulders had stopped shaking, and he seemed calmer. My arm was aching from where it was held around him but I didn’t want to let go, so I ignored it. Tsuki, now that she was happy I was safe, was in high spirits again, and abandoned the puppy pile to try and mimic Shiba’s wary patrol.

“What happened?” Sakura asked quietly, breaking the silence. Naruto shifted against my other side, lifting his head to pay attention. “Your eye’s bleeding. Did he...”

“He tried to take it,” I said, swallowing against the bitter taste in my mouth and tightening my grip convulsively on Naruto. I realised what I was doing a second later and carefully relaxed again, forcing my heartbeat to slow. Orochimaru was gone. I was surrounded by pack. I was fine.

“So it _was_ bloodline theft,” Sakura concluded quietly. She shuddered, pressing closer. “God, Sasuke. I’m so sorry.”

“Don’t be. When I didn’t have it, he lost interest.” It wasn’t quite what had happened, but. If he’d known I _had_ had it, I doubted he would’ve left as easily as he did, or ignored as many chances to give me the curse mark as he had. Besides, what if he’d taken my eye and not been able to awaken a sharingan? He’d hardly want a one-eyed host. The idea that he was withholding the curse mark until he knew for sure I was a decent investment was as good as any other I had, and if I held onto tighter than perhaps I should, well, that was my decision. I could go round in circles second guessing if I was ever really safe, and all I’d do was wear myself out. “Really, bloodline theft was the best possible outcome,” I concluded. “I’m not worth anything without my eyes.”

Naruto made a noise of protest, smacking a hand against my ribs. “Don’t _say_ that,” he said sharply. “You’re worth everything. And even if you weren’t, you’re team. You can’t just - you can’t _say_ things like that.” Whatever anger he’d started with trailed off to a desperate kind of sincerity at the end, and I pulled him back into the hug in apology, left arm flopping uselessly as I tried to make it go round him as well.

“Sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean it. Not for me, I meant I wasn’t worth anything to him.”

“But you still used yourself as bait so we could escape,” he argued. “We keep telling you not to put yourself in danger and you keep saying you’ll listen, but then danger happens and you just - bastard, what if you die? What are we meant to do if you die?”

_Feed the fish for me,_ I thought, and bit my lip. Even I could tell that was wholly inappropriate. So was _burn my eyes before Danzo gets them,_ but the only other thing coming to mind was _I think he’s called Sai and you won’t get on at first but I’m pretty sure you like him in the end._

“I don’t know,” I said instead. It came out too lost, and I shook my head roughly, taking my right hand back to run it through my hair. “I don’t - I’m not trying to get myself killed. That’s not - I promise I’m not suicidal, I’ve never wanted to die.”

“That’s not what we’re saying though,” Sakura said. Her voice was calm, the gentle authority she used when she was worried of scaring someone off. If I had the energy I would’ve reflexively baulked at it, but I also listened, because it meant that she thought someone needed to hear something even if they didn’t want to and she was usually right. “We don’t think you want to die. We think you don’t care if you die. There’s a difference. You’re trying to protect everyone, but you won’t let anyone protect you.”

I grimaced, pulling my knees up towards my chest. Kakashi protected me in Wave. Gaara protected me here. Hell, my whole life plan revolved around getting to my brother so he could protect me. Even the damn invasion - I’d delegated that to Rasa, hadn’t I?

“Sasuke,” Naruto said, leaning forward to look at me and waiting until I looked guardedly back. “If you die, we’ll be hurt. We’ll be _worse_ than hurt. You’re important, and if you don’t care about you, then care about what happens to us if we lose you.” His eyes were blue and overbright, and his face was serious. “Don’t do that to us, bastard,” he said, pleaded, and I could feel my own eyes stinging in response to tears gathering in his. “Don’t do it to us, and don’t you _dare_ do it for us.”

I ducked my head, needing to blink but unable to keep eye contact. “I’m sorry,” I told my knees, and this time I meant it. “I don’t mean to. I didn’t -” _know what else to do,_ but I had to break off because my voice was too wobbly, my throat too thick to keep talking through.

“We know,” Sakura said. “We don’t want you to be sorry.” She tried for a grin and teased, “You’re cuter when you’re happy, Sasuke-kun.”

I flinched. “Don’t call me that,” I said before I could stop myself. “Kun. I’m not. I’m not kun. And you don’t have a crush on me anymore, you got over that.”

“Sorry, I don’t - I mean, I did, I did get over it. Sorry. No more jokes, I promise, and no more kun if you don’t like it.”

“You are really bad at them,” I agreed, quirking my lips in an attempt at a half-smile. “Inappropriate humour in the face of awkwardness is my thing, don’t steal it from me.”

Still, even if it had reminded me of Orochimaru practically _crooning_ my name, Sakura’s joke had done the job of breaking the tension, and when we settled back we were sat more comfortably side by side than the intense hug situation we’d been in earlier.

“Hime-chan?” Naruto offered. “Or wait, bastard-chan. Hime-bastard? Sasuke-hime-bastard?”

I wrinkled my nose. “God, no. Why do you always go for hime?”

“Because you like being called a girl,” he said, stretching. “Oh, I know. Sa-chan.”

I stopped, blindsided, mouth probably hanging open. Next to me Sakura squinted as she thought, then blinked in surprise. “Huh,” she said. “I never noticed that.”

“Yeah, Moegi calls him Sasuke-nee and sometimes the shopkeepers call him shinobi-chan or kunoichi-chan. He tries to brush it off but you can tell he’s pleased.”

I attempted to say something and managed a vaguely high pitched squeak. Sakura and Naruto both looked at me, Naruto confused by my reaction - why wouldn’t he be, I thought somewhat hysterically, he’d apparently known for ages that I was a lot less boy than I claimed to be and had just _accepted_ it - while Sakura was frowning in consideration. “Ok then,” she said, face smoothing out as she came to a decision. “Sasuke-chan. I can do that.” She hesitated, then asked, “Just chan instead of kun, or…?”

I stared back at her with wide eyes and blurted, “Orochimaru put a seal on my arm and now it won’t work.”

There was a pause.

“Puppy,” Pakkun sighed. “You were doing so well.”

The dogs stayed while we made our way back to Team Ten. Tsuki spent the whole time trying to convince Pakkun that Puppy was just for Naruto, and that he should use Kitten and Sakura-bitch instead of calling us all the same name. Pakkun was adamant that we were _all_ puppies, even Kakashi. (“Kakashi?” Tsuki repeated, sneezing in confusion. “Big dog-man,” Pakkun supplied. “He’s called Pup.”)

My arm was in a sling, more to stop it getting in the way than anything else. There was nothing _wrong_ with it, no wounds and nothing to patch up - it just didn’t respond to anything. Sakura’s biggest worry had been that I’d accidentally hurt it and not realise, hence the sling to keep it safe, but beyond Urushi sniffing it carefully and pronouncing it not actually dead, there wasn’t much else we could do. It was hard enough trying to get my jacket back on over it once I’d taken it off so they could inspect the damage.

Pakkun led us back to a different part of the forest than the one I’d left the others in. We took it at a loping speed, Bull and Tsuki flanking us while Shiba and Urushi fanned out. I think Shiba was hoping to run into someone and work off some aggression, but thankfully we didn’t meet anyone. I recounted the important parts of fighting Orochimaru along the way, namely that he’d tried to awaken my sharingan by making me afraid and had backed off after Gaara appeared. I may have downplayed exactly how the battle, if it could be called a battle, had ended; we’d already cried over my self-sacrificial tendencies enough for one day.

“Gaara?” Naruto repeated, wrinkling his nose. “The sand guy again?”

“I don’t know why he was there,” I said honestly. “He keeps trying to talk to me. I’m pretty sure he’s just trying to make friends but…” I shrugged, helplessly. Friends was my strongest hypothesis, though still baffling as to how it had started - maybe the fact that I wasn’t afraid of him was enough? I’d definitely _been_ afraid of him in the past, even if I hadn’t reacted to his killing intent. On the other hand, it was also a stated fact that he’d tried to kill me at least once, and almost every time I saw him he opened the conversation by informing me that Shukaku felt my fear, so. “Either way, he helped me.”

Mixed messages.

“Could he be trying to recruit you?” Sakura offered, sounding dubious but attempting to be diplomatic. “Like what Hokage-sama thought Haku was doing?”

“Haku wasn’t recruiting anyone,” Naruto muttered mulishly. “Haku also didn’t aim killing intent at people or attack Shikamaru. Or stalk you. Haku was _nothing like_ this guy.”

I ignored him. If he didn’t like Gaara because he’d recognised Gaara’s jinchuuriki status, that was hypocritical and he’d get over it once he realised Gaara could be converted. If he had another reason for not liking Gaara, well, attacking Shikamaru wasn’t ideal but everyone made mistakes.

“I don’t think he’s recruiting me,” I said. “He’s not exactly persuasive. Or charismatic. If he asked me to join Suna it’d probably make me less likely to.” I thought about mentioning that Suna were theoretically allies but decided against; both because they _weren’t_ , though hopefully Rasa would listen to my warnings, and because friendly poaching among allies wasn’t exactly unheard of. 

Emphasis on _friendly_. Seducing someone with a bloodline limit was one thing; outright stealing or kidnapping was universally frowned on and reserved for enemies. Even Orochimaru had waited for canon Sasuke to come to him, though using the curse seal was definitely iffy. So was trying to scoop out my eyeball with a shuriken, actually. Plus Orochimaru was definitely an enemy, which made him all around a bad example who wouldn’t hesitate to engage in a bit of casual bloodline theft if the mood took him. Moving on.

“There’s not much we can do,” Sakura was saying, voice tight with frustration. “It’d be stupid to seek him out, and if he hasn’t attacked you outside the exams then he hasn’t _legally_ done anything that we can bring the village in on.”

“So what, we just wait for him to come back and try again?” Naruto asked hotly. “That’s stupid!”

“Last time he saved my life,” I pointed out, but this didn’t appear to matter much to the other two.

“We don’t _just wait,_ ” Sakura said. “We’ll keep our guard up, and we’ll let Kakashi know, but Konoha won’t throw out a foreign genin without reason. Rivalries and grudge matches are part of the exam.” She didn’t sound best pleased with that, but she was practical enough to understand how the village worked and see the reality of it. I didn’t know if she recognised any of the Sand siblings as the Kazekage’s kids, but Gaara was clearly a big player and well within his right to murder other contestants; politically, he was too well protected for us to touch.

Not that we needed to because he’d still saved my life _and_ backed off both Chouji and Shikamaru when I asked, but. Now wasn’t the time to make a big deal of it, and we reached Team Ten by that point anyway and set the conversation aside.

“You found him,” Ino said, shooting us a tired but lopsided grin as she stood up and started walking towards us. The gauze she’d taped over her earlier wound had been joined by a neat pair of butterfly plasters across her cheek that she was very carefully not disturbing, but other than that she didn’t look hurt. Shikamaru was pulling himself to his feet behind her, balancing his weight mostly on one ankle but still able to walk, and Chouji was awake and now able to focus - a definite improvement on how he’d been earlier.

“In the flesh,” I said, answering her grin with a wry one of my own. Down an arm, almost down an eye, but for six genin who’d just faced a jinchuuriki, a sannin and a boss snake summons in the space of one afternoon - yeah. I’d take it.

Ino reached us and punched me on my good arm, hard enough to be felt but not to hurt. “You’re an idiot,” she said, but she was still smiling. “I’m glad you’re ok.”

“Of course he’s ok,” Tsuki said, dancing around us in a way that set her white fur bouncing. “Kitten’s pack. Akino. Akino, I brought the people back, play with me.”

Silence. Tsuki dropped her front half to the floor, tail up and wagging and let her mouth hang open with her tongue lolling out; Akino - one of the two dogs left behind with Team Ten while Sakura and Naruto came after me - stared at her blankly from behind his sunglasses, and I swear if dogs had eyebrows he’d’ve raised his.

“Ignore her,” I said with a grimace. “She’s a puppy.”

“A puppy,” Shikamaru repeated dryly. “I wondered where the Kitten nickname came from.”

“I will end you, Nara.” 

There was an odd pause as we all subtly checked on each other, reassuring ourselves that we were ok and compartmentalising - or attempting to compartmentalise - the battle.

“So what now?” Naruto asked, squinting up at the sky to check the time. “Do we go to the tower, or do you guys need another scroll? I think we’re close enough to make it tonight.”

“To the - oh. The exam.” Ino scrubbed a hand over her face, avoiding the plasters, and grimaced. I sympathised - God, I’d forgotten that’s why we were all here. Who had brain to spare to think about scrolls after everything else had happened? “Can we even finish it?”

Sakura frowned. “Why not? We’ve got a day left, and the original plan still stands: we’ll be safer there than here. If you need help with the earth scroll then -”

“We have the scrolls,” Ino said. “I meant the dogs. Senseis aren’t allowed to interfere. Not that I’m not glad yours did, but. Aren’t we disqualified now?”

Sakura’s face didn’t fall, not visibly - if anything she frowned more - but I knew being chunin meant a lot to her. Getting her to at least the next round had been the whole point of taking the damn exam, and I felt a sudden surge of annoyance that we could have survived so much and have it all be for nothing, even if objectively I should be glad just to be alive. I caught her eye, then said, deliberately casual and slowly enough for her to interrupt at any time, “Oh, didn’t you hear? Sakura’s a dog summoner.”

There was a pause, then, “Yeah,” Naruto chimed in. “Kakashi’s not here, right? So it must’ve been Sakura who summoned them all. It’s logic.”

“Logic,” Shikamaru repeated flatly. There was no way he bought that Sakura had the chakra to summon and sustain the entire pack.

“What can I say,” Sakura said, shrugging a shoulder with an odd twist to her expression. “I like dogs. If you’ve got both scrolls, let’s go - the sooner we get out of here, the better. Chouji, can you walk?”

I blinked after her, taken aback by the abruptness. So were the others, though after sharing a glance with Shikamaru Ino just shook her head. “Geez, your whole team’s insane. Summoner as a genin. Sure. Wait up Forehead, I’ll get his other side.”

“She’s right, you know,” Pakkun said in a low aside. “We shouldn’t really be here.” He yawned, clearly not caring about the rules he was breaking. “We’ll stay till you get close to the tower, but leave us out the reports, Pup.”

It wasn’t a long walk. With Sakura and Ino supporting Chouji, and me keeping close to Shikamaru and his orange clone-crutch until he’d managed to find his rhythm enough to not need me, we took less than an hour to reach the large clearing in the centre of the forest. The dogs stayed as promised, Shiba, Akino and Urushi disappearing into the trees to scout while Bull, Pakkun and Tsuki kept close. Guruko had vanished, presumably to update Kakashi on our progress - I wasn’t sure how the message passing worked, but I guess the dogs had a way to signal Kakashi when they wanted to be summoned? Or could reverse summon themselves to him? Either way, it was a useful way to keep him updated, but it cost us a dog each time and I didn’t know how easily Tsuki could bring them back again.

We left them in the trees, Bull giving me a last whuff to make sure my hair would be irrevocably drooled on before he followed Pakkun back to wherever summons lived. Even Tsuki went, though she was adamant that she wasn’t tired and didn’t need to go. Not that we left ourselves unprotected without them; it was late enough that the sun was low in the sky and even in the clearing the tower was surrounded by shadows. That, and a lot of orange, Naruto bringing up the rear of the group with his arms folded behind his head and his eyes closed to help him concentrate on the memories from the clones he was continually making and dispelling. It was a novel approach to surveillance, and from his frown not the easiest thing to maintain - several of the clones were henged into small birds to get an aerial snapshot, and the conflicting viewpoints must be headachingly complicated to sort through.

Finally reaching the tower and opening the scrolls was a relief. As was the fact that as well as dormitory style bunks upstairs and an array of food in the large room downstairs, the tower came fully equipped with _bathrooms._ Glorious, glorious water. Cold, and presented traditional style in a wash basin with a stool to sit on while you poured scoopfulls over yourself, but you know what, I was ok with that. It was water. Clean water. I loved water. Don’t let anyone ever tell you otherwise.

“You ok?” I asked Sakura later that evening, awkwardly juggling two plates of dumplings in my right hand. She took one from me with a nod of thanks as I sat next to her, dangling my feet over the edge of the walkway round the stairwell. “You’ve been quiet.”

It wasn’t the most tactful way I could’ve asked, but I’d been chewing over it since we set off for the tower. Naruto was immeasurably happier now we were safe - and I think seeing Iruka had helped - and mental exhaustion from the sheer quantity of clones he’d been making had driven him to pretty much crash, but once the stress had passed, Sakura had just… been quiet. Not in a bad way, and I couldn’t tell you why I was worried about her except that I was; normally when the pressure of being the team leader got to her Sakura went sharp, short tempered and brittle, snapping and then apologising in quick frustrated succession. This soft and muted mood didn’t suit her.

“I’m ok,” she said, flashing me an off-smile. “Just thinking.”

“Oh.” I took a bite of dumpling, not sure if that was an invitation to ask again or to leave her to it. They were prawn - I’d checked - and a bit plain without anything to dip them in, but they were also real food and therefore the most delicious thing I’d ever tasted.

“Is it selfish to care about the exam?” she asked suddenly. I hastily swallowed my mouthful, but she kept talking rather than wait for an answer. “I mean, people died. Shikamaru nearly died. You nearly died. If I didn’t have Tsuki-chan, if Kakashi hadn’t sent the pack - and now we’re here, and Iruka told us we did a good job and gave us a lesson about being a shinobi just like we were at the academy again.”

“I don’t remember academy exercises being this long,” I said, then winced. This probably wasn’t the time to try and be funny.

“Team Eight are alive,” she continued, ignoring me. “I think. It’s classified, Iruka wouldn’t tell me details, but they found them by one of the other gates and he mentioned guards on the hospital. It was never them in the forest with us.” She poked at her dumpling, pushing all the filling down to one end. “It wouldn’t be classified unless there was something to hide. I hope they’re ok.”

“I do too,” I said honestly. I hadn’t even thought to ask. Hospital was a lot better than dead, and if I stopped to think that was more than I could have expected for them. I was glad though. Given that they’d been fine in canon, anything that happened to them would, technically, be my fault. Even if I couldn’t have hoped to stop it. The thought made me vaguely sick, so I deliberately put it aside; I was glad they were alive whether it was my fault or not, and that was the more important thing. “Why would it be selfish?”

She pulled a face. “You nearly died, Sasuke-chan. I know that doesn’t mean much to you but -”

“It does,” I interrupted. “And that’s not what I meant.” I frowned, trying to think how to word it. “Caring about one thing doesn’t mean you have to stop caring about others. If being a chunin is important to you, then it matters. Doesn’t it?”

“Should it though? It’s just a rank. You’re comparing a promotion to someone’s life, they’re not the same.”

“... But if it makes you happy? Or not having it makes you sad? My life being shit doesn’t make your life unimportant.” I leaned forward to try and gauge her expression. What would Naruto say? Something about precious people and dreams? “Why did you want to be a ninja?”

She snorted. “My dad ruined my birthday.”

“Uh.” That. Wasn’t what I’d expected. I took another bite of dumpling while I paused to regroup, and Sakura shot me a wry and self-deprecating smile.

“I know, right? Naruto wants to be Hokage, you want to stop people getting hurt, and I wanted to use a sword to make my dad’s boss give him time off to come to my party.” She hummed, cocking her head. “And be rich. Strong rich people had friends, and fancy bakery cakes, and they were pretty and popular and blonde. You never went to one of Ino’s birthdays when we were kids, did you? They were amazing. I don’t know why she stopped them.”

“I - no. Maybe? I wasn’t a clan heir then, I don’t think I got invited.”

“Yeah,” she said, smile turning down. “I wasn’t either.” She looked back at her plate, and started carefully peeling the prawn filling out of its wrapper.

In an abstract sense, I’d known that Sakura was a civilian. In an abstract sense, I knew Konoha skewed heavily towards the clans, and I guess I could’ve worked out that half the reason I was a fangirl target at the academy was because the Uchiha were old and wealthy and anyone who married me would end up the clan head’s wife with society’s doors opened to them - or, that’s how it would appear from the outside. But beyond that, I’d… honestly never given it much thought. I’d always had the clan, that was just the way life was, and it wasn’t like I’d ever massively benefited from being Uchiha. If anything it brought more problems.

No, that wasn’t true. I knew that Sakura’s life was harder than mine. I’d even been angry about it in a general fight-me-Konoha sort of way when people dismissed her, or disregarded how much work she’d put in to keep up with the clan kids, I just. Hadn’t connected it. And when I had thought about it, it’d only been in relation to her learning to be a ninja. I didn’t even know what her parents did, or if she was well off for a civilian or not. I didn’t know what _counted_ as well off for a civilian, other than that it was probably a lot less than what counted as well off for a clan.

I had a sudden image of Inari, pointing at the Hokage and telling him that taxes were there to support infrastructure and if you didn’t look after your people then how could people look after themselves. Maybe Tazuna had been right; villages didn’t need heroes to lead them, even if their hats were impressive. They needed solid financial planning and - god, I forget the term. Something about stability? Mobility? Inari was pretty hot on rice farmers.

Not that rice farmers would help me know what to say, or how to deal with the sudden discomfort of realising I'd missed a lot of implications of the clan-civilian divide. “I’ll throw you a party,” I offered, mind blank and words falling out my mouth. “With, um, balloons. Is pass the parcel a thing? I can do that. And candles, so many candles the cake will be on fire. Except with fire-proof icing. So it won’t be.”

“Wow, Sasuke-chan,” she said, but she was laughing. “What kind of parties did you go to?”

“And when Naruto’s Hokage,” I doggedly continued, “We’ll make him put us on the council and we’ll fix it. And they’ll have to listen to us, because I’ll be a clan head and you’ll be the strongest person in the village, and if you want a sword I think Kakashi-sensei uses a sword so he can teach you, and we’ll make it _better_.”

“Yeah?” she asked, tilting her head and smiling, though the laugh hadn’t quite faded from her voice. I scowled and lifted my chin, sticking to my plan. I had none of her skill with people or Naruto’s overflowing goodness, but that didn’t mean I wasn’t going to try.

“Yeah,” I said. “And if they stop us, we’ll fight them. And start our own village. Kakashi can come. So can Chouji.”

“Not Ino or Shikamaru? I thought you liked them now.”

I hummed. “Maybe. Chouji would be sad if they didn’t, I guess.”

“Ok,” she said, still smiling. “I’ll make chunin, and when Naruto’s Hokage you’ll be there to change the world with us. It’s a deal.”

“Deal,” I agreed firmly. _Itachi_ , a part of me protested, and I pushed it firmly aside. We weren’t worrying about me at the moment. We were helping Sakura. We could reconcile the two later. “Also, where is your comb. I need to fix your hair.”

“Ah, yeah.” She brought a handful of it forward to inspect. “I’m not used to the tubs, my hair goes weird if it’s not in a proper shower. It’s a mess, sorry.”

“No sorry. Just comb. Eat your dinner, it’ll go cold.”

She toasted me with the naked, unwrapped prawn of her poor dumpling, and ate it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ongoing Orochimaru-shaped trauma:  
> Sasuke: denied
> 
> Sakura, tentatively trying to ask if Sasuke's actually a girl:  
> Sasuke: denied
> 
> The glaring elephant in the room of promising to help fix Konoha while also planning to run away and join your brother's terrorist organisation:  
> Sasuke: _denied_


	26. Chapter 26

The last day in the tower was tense. There was basic medical care, but not much; enough to keep us alive, but if we wanted anything further we had to drop out and forfeit the exam. I hesitated over my arm. Sakura and Naruto, I think, were under the impression that it was numb in the way a Hyuuga closing a tenketsu would leave an arm numb. Seals really weren’t common. Other than Sakura’s messing with her chainsaw gloves and whatever vague knowledge Naruto had of his, I doubted either of them knew much.

Even storage seals and the like were prohibitively expensive. Which, given how useful they were, was a frustration. Not to mention a waste - surely someone, somewhere, would have messed about enough to make a living from selling seals en masse? When I was younger and exploring the compound I hadn’t ever twigged how rare the ones I found were. Forget _someone_ making a living from seals; why hadn’t the clan? I couldn’t write seals to save my life, but with the sharingan even I could do a decent job of decoding them. How much of Konoha’s reliance on genin as a cheap infrastructure solution, I wondered, could be solved if there was a decently funded seal department replacing child labour with technology?

But those were thoughts for a later time. If Sakura got her way, maybe they’d be thoughts for her. I might have said I’d be there with her, but. I mean, I already knew I wasn’t hero material, breaking a promise shouldn’t come as a surprise. I didn’t have a choice. I couldn’t stay in Konoha. I couldn’t - I _had_ to go. Even if Naruto became Hokage and Sakura fixed it, it would take too long. They didn’t - Danzo. I had to. You can’t blame me when it’s not my fault.

Like I said though, thoughts for a later time. For now, we were down to hours left of the second exam, and almost every remaining team had thronged to the tower in a desperate bid for scrolls.

I didn’t watch. Shikamaru did, either gathering data for the following rounds or distracting himself from Chouji; like me, Chouji had chosen to stay at the tower so his team would pass, and like Sakura, Shikamaru was clearly conflicted.

“I’ve searched the entire tower,” I said, pushing my way through the door with Naruto on my heels. “There is no soy sauce. Vegetables don’t exist. Vinegar has not once passed through the sacred threshold of misery that we are subjected to. Behold: rice.”

“Rice is good,” Chouji said, though from his face I could tell it wasn’t good enough. He might have refused medical attention, but it turned out he’d been poisoned by Kankuro’s puppet. Being Akimichi was probably the only thing that saved him, and even with that advantage and his condition holding stable for the time being, he was still running on dangerously low dregs. “Did they have anything salty? I’m sorry to send you back.”

“Salt,” I repeated, putting the bowl and chopsticks within easy reach. “I can do that.” I glowered when he tried to apologise again. There were too many other nin around, and he was ill. If he wanted salt, then whether it was for health or flavour reasons, I’d get him salt, and he’d stay here with Ino and not let anyone else in the room. It was fine.

“There was a Rain guy who had miso on the second floor,” Naruto offered. “Miso’s salty.” Given that the second floor had been empty when we’d checked it together, I assumed he’d had a clone there and contemplated switching my glower to him. He’d crashed _hard_ after the number he’d used in the forest yesterday, and though it didn’t appear to have left any effects (or, more likely, Kyuubi had managed to heal any damage it had done) he was meant to be taking it easy.

“Second floor’s out,” Sakura said tiredly, dropping down to the window sill from outside. Shikamaru followed a beat behind her, favouring his leg, but otherwise not showing any sign of it having been injured the day before. “Sorry, Chouji. The team from Suna just arrived.”

“Gaara?” I asked, straightening. I hadn’t expected him to fail, but I couldn’t say I wasn’t relieved that he’d made it. Seeing him still out in the forest yesterday had thrown me - though, I guess, the team was that overpowered compared to everyone else that they could afford to take it slow. Or spend more time weeding out the competition, which seemed equally likely now I thought about it.

“Yeah,” she agreed. Her eyes flicked over my shoulder to Naruto and then back to me. “He killed four people outside the tower.” In the background, Shikamaru looked vaguely green.

“Oh.” I held my right arm over my chest, tucking it into the crook of my left elbow. If the sling wasn’t there, it would look like I was just crossing my arms, and I wasn’t sure why I felt the need. “Maybe he needed their scrolls? It’s almost the deadline.”

“He left them with the corpses,” Shikamaru said flatly, though in a way that said he was trying not to remember rather than with any anger behind it. “A grass team took them.”

Oh. So, just mother wanting their blood, then. Good good. Glad to hear he was still deranged.

Naruto stepped up behind me, standing close enough that I could feel the body heat radiating off him. I looked back at him, then wondered if I should amend; there was a purple tint to his irises, and when he spoke his canines seemed sharper than they should be. It might be body heat I was feeling, but when he drew on the kyuubi’s chakra it felt a lot like fire to me, so. It might be that.

“So we avoid him. Don’t go near him, don’t let him come near us. Keep him away from Shikamaru, keep him away from the bastard.”

 _He’s meant to be one of your precious people_ , I thought with an edge of despair. It wasn’t his fault he was so murderous at the moment. Or, it was, but it’d be ok because he was good underneath. He’d never actually followed through on killing me. Or Shikamaru. Or Chouji. He _saved_ me. He wasn’t bad, he was just trying to exist.

It felt right, but the argument sounded weak when I tried to put it into words and I didn’t say it outloud.

“We might not get a choice,” Ino said. “Don’t these sorts of exams usually have a tournament phase? If we get matched up against him we’d have to fight.”

“Or forfeit,” Sakura corrected with a frown. “Exams aren’t worth dying over.” She directed that frown to me when she said it, and I raised my good hand in a placating motion.

“I know,” I promised, before she could say anything else. “I’m an arm down. I stay in to get you two through to the next round, then I’m out. I got it. Me and Chouji will cheerlead.” And, to prove my dedication to the role, I ducked away from Naruto and dropped down to sit on the floor next to Chouji’s bed. He flashed me a sympathetic smile; he knew more than most how to make the call of pushing on and hurting yourself or pulling back and fighting another day. It’s what his whole family’s fighting style revolved around with their soldier pills, after all.

“It sucks though,” Ino complained. “Bloodline theft’s nothing to do with the exam, you shouldn’t have to fail because of that. It’s not fair.”

I blinked. I mean. No, but. Why would it be.

“We’re ninja,” Shikamaru told her, pulling a face. “ _Life’s_ not fair. It’s troublesome, and then you die.”

I blinked again. I agreed in theory, but that seemed unnecessarily dark coming from Shikamaru. _I_ knew that life was shit and the village didn’t care and/or was actively out to get me, but. I had a sharingan. Eyeballs, and all that. Unique circumstances. When I looked at the others though, no one corrected him, even if Sakura was frowning consideringly and Naruto looked unhappy at the thought. I tilted my head back to look at Chouji even, and though he seemed to be more distressed by Shikamaru’s statement than Shikamaru was, he made no move to correct it.

“It’s not all bad,” I said, bewildered. The forest had been a shock, maybe even Team Ten’s first brush with mortality, yes, but you couldn’t just… give up? That wasn’t the right way to say it. Life was bad, but older brothers made it good? No. Not everyone had an older brother, and Itachi was too complicated for what I meant. I cast around for a way to put into words the conviction I had that they were wrong, but the best I could come up with was, “They’ve started selling mango mochi. It’s mochi, but better, because it has mango. Mango mochi.”

Pause. I looked at each of them hopefully, tilting my head and trying to will them back to how they should be again. Shikamaru wasn’t meant to be pessimistic like that. Naruto wasn’t meant to _let_ people be pessimistic like that. I wasn’t meant to be the one cheering people up, I was meant to grump and snark and retreat to Plushie-tan and poetry and pyjamas, but at least I _had_ Plushie-tan and poetry and pyjamas to retreat to.

“My mum’s been teaching me how to make tempura,” Chouji offered hesitantly, and I practically slumped back against his bed in relief. Naruto caught my eye and grinned, and if it looked a touch strained I didn’t care because at least he was smiling again.

“Yeah, and when we beat this stupid exam we can all go out for Ichiraku’s, believe it!”

“And after that we can go to Yakiniku’s for _real_ food,” Ino added with a haughty sniff that made Naruto squawk in outrage.

I bowed out of the conversation and settled further into my seat on the floor, paying just enough attention to notice Sakura protesting the lack of fish or vegetable options while tactfully avoiding saying why that was important. Not that I actually minded people outside Team Seven knowing I didn’t eat meat, but I guessed it would seem a bit weird and I hadn’t exactly been broadcasting it.

No, correct that. I minded people knowing random facts about me a _lot_ , but I didn’t mind Team Ten knowing.

“Mango mochi, huh?” Shikamaru asked, low enough to slide under what was now a far more heated debate about restaurants than it needed to be. “And that makes life worth it?”

I wrinkled my nose at him, not sure if he was teasing or not. I never claimed to be good with words, not when it came to important things. “They’re better than bananas,” I said, careful not to let Naruto hear. “Bananas go mushy. I regret the bananas.”

He stared at me for a long second then snorted and broke eye contact. “Sure,” he said, and now I definitely knew he was teasing. “Bananas go mushy, why not.”

Seeing as I wasn’t going to explain the backstory for that, even if he _was_ Team Ten, I stuck my tongue out and left it be.

When it ended - when we officially passed - it was like a weight lifted off us. Genin weren’t supposed to keep fighting while in the tower, and once we’d retreated to our shared room we’d pretty much stayed there, but _god_ it was good to be out again. Even if _out_ meant a large arena and what was probably meant to be an uplifting speech from the Hokage while the Kazekage sat beside him and strengthened political ties or whatever he was meant to do, it was still better than the entire _everything_ of the second exam.

No Kakashi yet though. I hadn’t seen him, but Urushi had woven his way through the arena to us almost as soon as we arrived, so he had to be somewhere close. Even just having Urushi went a long way to making things better, and he stuck close against us, quiet enough to go mostly unnoticed but comforting all the same.

I entertained myself while the Hokage spoke by trying to count how many teams there were. Us and Team Ten, of course, and Lee’s distinctive jumpsuit made Team Gai easy to spot. At least one other Konoha team, though I could only see one member of it just then and didn’t recognise them, and the Sand siblings, a team from Rain who’d finished before us, two fairly nondescript boys I thought I’d seen before -

The third member of that last team caught my eye and glared. I blinked back, startled to see the red hair and glasses of the Grass kunoichi I’d threatened in the forest and taken the earth scroll from. I hadn’t expected them to pass, and if I’d hoped she wouldn’t hold a grudge, I was wrong.

I looked away. Seven teams in total. No Sound; I’d got one of their teams out in the written exam, and their other one hadn’t passed in canon either. No Team Eight; I’d got them out by spotting Orochimaru and making him change disguises to stay hidden. Iruka had said they’d been found, but there were no rumours. It set me on edge; there were always rumours. If there weren’t, someone was suppressing them, and if someone was suppressing them, then I really wanted to know what they were. You didn’t hide good news.

Speaking of, Chouji had taken his weakest soldier pill. He’d promised us it wouldn’t hurt him, not beyond wearing him out when the effects faded, but it disguised how badly Kankurou’s poison had affected him and allowed him to stand with us in the arena until it was time to forfeit before the preliminaries, which I was vaguely surprised to see going ahead. Seven teams wasn’t exactly a lot of people by my count - unless they’d always planned to have preliminaries, and needing to cut the numbers down even further was just an excuse? The casual deception wouldn’t surprise me, but it also wouldn’t change the outcome so there wasn’t much point worrying about it.

On my part, a dead arm was easier to hide. I had a splint inside my jacket sleeve to keep it straight, bandages keeping the fingers tightly together so they wouldn’t accidentally get caught on something and snap when I couldn’t feel them, and that was it. At a casual glance, it should look fine, and if anyone questioned why I was forfeiting when I didn’t seem injured, I’d smirk in pity at their small-mindedness until they backed off in shame and unease at not understanding my master plan. It was flawless. No way for it to go wrong. The Hokage had given the stage to one of the proctors - Hayate? He had a sword - to explain the details, in just a minute I’d raise my hand and be free of this whole thing, and once I was I’d grab a seat next to Bull and watch Sakura beat the shit out of people. Really, I was almost looking forward to it.

“Excuse me,” a voice said to my left, soft and hesitant. “Do you want me to look at that for you? Only I’m a healer, and we’re both from Konoha so I should help you out if I can, right?”

I froze.

The other Konoha team.

 _Kabuto_.

“Here,” he said, and out the corner of my eye I could see him lift his palm, a faint haze of chakra glowing round it. I wanted, desperately, to flinch away, kawarimi, _anything_ , but - I couldn’t. Urushi pressed back against my legs, trying to herd me to a safer distance, and I stayed where I was and couldn’t move. “It’s a diagnosis jutsu, I just need to check -”

His hand stopped in midair, the fingers flexing involuntarily into a fist as Shikamaru stepped up next to me. One hand was in the seal to activate his shadow technique; his other was clenched in the fist that Kabuto was mimicking. A second later and Naruto had stepped between us, shoulders squared, face set in a scowl and claws out on his fingers. Distantly, I felt the familiar warmth from him, kyuubi making his chakra run hot - but distantly. There was something between it and me, cold and terrifying, and I still couldn’t move.

Sakura joined us. She said something, I couldn’t tell what. Hayate called for people to drop out if they needed to. Chouji raised his hand, and gave me a worried stare; Ino tried to elbow me in the side. I think Shikamaru shifted his shadow to me and tried to break me out of whatever was holding me but the same thing that was blocking Naruto’s chakra from reaching me blocked him and I couldn’t. Move.

Out the corner of my eye I watched Kabuto. He was backing off, trying to explain that he was just trying to help - but his hand hadn’t stopped its faint glowing. Could the others see it? I didn’t know if my sharingan was activated. I didn’t know if that would have an effect, it’d never helped me see chakra before. He was watching me, calculating behind his apologetic facade, and as he tilted his head the cold fear holding me in place suddenly flared; I was trapped, I was outclassed, if this was killing intent then god what would it feel like when he actually cut me open, I reeled my chakra in in a panicked flinch and suppressed it so hard I lost track of my senses but Kabuto’s chakra came with me and I was drowning in it, my heart pounded too fast too hard and I tried desperately to make it stop my jaw hurt from clenching it and I hadn’t breathed for too long but did that matter, the world was going grey, would it be better, at least if I suffocated I wouldn’t be conscious when he laid me out and took my eyes with a scalpel carved a space inside my head and Orochimaru would wear me like a puppet or did I have to be awake could he bring me back would he bring me back what if he brought me back -

Naruto’s claws dug into my shoulder, and I choked on the heat of his chakra flooding over me. I was vaguely aware of the others shifting instinctively back and wondered how much of the kyuubi he had to be projecting at the moment, but I didn’t care. I didn’t _care_. It was like being pulled out the river again; Naruto felt like fire, and my chest heaved as though I could breathe it and burn Kabuto’s killing intent out of me.

“- bastard,” he was saying, pressing closer until I was almost leaning against him. “Look at me. C’mon, bastard.”

“I’m fine,” I said, but I made no move to move away. It came out quiet and hoarse, and I shook my head to clear it. Fuck, people survived killing intent all the time. Just because I wasn’t used to it - _fuck_. How did I even feel it? I didn’t think I was able to. Even _Gaara_ just felt sandy, and if I pulled my chakra back inside myself I could escape it. Kabuto’s though, it was like it was under my _skin_ , there was nowhere I could go to get out of it.

Under my skin. Like knives, like scalpels, rearranging me without even needing to make me bleed -

“I’m fine,” I repeated roughly, looking up at him and scowling. Naruto stared back, mouth pulled thin in an angry line and eyes tinted purple. “Stop that,” I huffed, standing straighter and trying to turn to block him from view. At least there were no other visible signs, and from the lack of reaction from anyone else in the arena he was keeping the kyuubi contained to where only we could feel it. Still; eyes teeth and claws were hardly subtle, and Urushi moved with me, lips pulled back in a silent snarl over his teeth as he glared balefully at the other genin around us. “People will notice.”

His eyebrows lowered. “That’s really not -”

“Are you hurt?” Sakura cut in. I shook my head. Just scared. I don’t know if Kabuto had just been testing a theory or if he’d had another purpose, but I wasn’t hurt. Rattled, yes, but - 

“The forfeits,” I hissed, looking up. Shit. _Shit,_ Hayate had moved on, they’d got out a large board to start displaying the matchups. I glanced around, but Kabuto had gone back to stand with his team.

“Forfeit in the match,” Shikamaru said tightly. “What did he do? I tried to reach you with my shadow and it’s like you didn’t _exist_.”

“I was trying not to,” I muttered, then faltered as Naruto’s grip tightened on me convulsively. “Not like _that_. I pull my chakra back to avoid killing intent, it just didn’t work this time. That’s all.”

“Killing intent?” Sakura repeated. She frowned worriedly, but I could see her thinking behind it. “You don’t feel it the same way most people do.” It wasn’t a question, and her eyes didn’t flick to Naruto, but I got the allusion all the same. And maybe this was an inappropriate time to be thinking about it but could Naruto _please_ have that conversation with us so I could stop pretending I didn’t know about the literal demon in his head. Stomach. _Whichever_.

“I’m just not used to it,” I said. It was even honest. “Look, he wanted me not to forfeit for whatever reason, that’s all. Like Shikamaru said though, I can still forfeit in the match. It’s _fine_ , ok?”

There was a tense pause, then Naruto pulled a face. “I _hate_ fine,” he muttered. His eyes were blue again though, and the fire had died down to his usual running-warm body heat rather than kyuubi-enhanced chakra. Part of the reason I wanted him to open that conversation was because he seemed to be pulling on kyuubi way easier than I remembered him doing. Wasn’t it meant to be reserved for extreme stress? Half the times he’d sprouted claws and fangs he hadn’t even been fighting.

Sakura looked like she was going to say something else, but just then the announcer boomed, much louder and harder to tune out than the speeches had been so far:

“The first match: Sabaku no Temari vs Ajisai of Rain!”

“Let me see,” Kakashi demanded almost as soon as we got to the stands. Urushi circled round behind him to sit next to Pakkun and Team Ten fanned out, loosely arranging themselves between us and Asuma. From the outside, we looked like two teams from the same village, interested in the match but also hanging back to discuss strategy for our own rounds. From the inside, Naruto was tense next to me and both dogs had their ears warily cocked. The alcove we were standing in did a good job of hiding us from view, and the way Kakashi and Naruto were standing meant that no one strolling past would be able to eavesdrop. Though, ninja; there were always ways around this, and if we weren’t forbidden from leaving until the matches ended we’d have found a better place.

The hospital, maybe. So Chouji could be on a hospital bed. With hospital people. _Hospitalling._ But he’d just smiled at me and said that his soldier pill wouldn’t run out for a bit and he wanted to watch the fights, as though he hadn’t always planned to get treatment _straight away_ for being _literally poisoned_. Literally. With poison. Poison people died from, Chouji. It kills people. No, I wasn’t appreciating the irony of someone else insisting they were fine, and no, I wasn’t enjoying how infuriating he was being or how impossible he was to argue with. Not because I was weak and didn’t try to argue with him anyway, but because he was a damn rock and everything I said rolled off him without leaving so much as a dent in his calmly reassuring smile.

 _Infuriating_.

I shifted my glare away from where Chouji was sitting - close enough to the walkway that he could lean over and offer to help people find seats if they loitered too much too near us, _don’t think I hadn’t noticed_ \- and held my arm to Kakashi. I still had mobility in the upper part but I had to awkwardly juggle tugging my jacket off and supporting the weight from my elbow downwards with my other hand. 

“Tell me what happened,” Kakashi said, reaching forward to help me. I assumed he’d got the gist of the main story from Pakkun, so I focussed on just explaining the relevant parts.

“There was a jinchuuriki,” I said. Naruto stiffened next to me, but if Kakashi was going to fix my arm, he needed all the details. Which is why, even though I wanted to hide exactly _how_ I’d got hurt, I kept going. “The seal was meant for him. It was a contact seal; I didn’t see any paper, Orochimaru just lit each of his fingers with chakra, and when he touched my elbow my arm went dead.”

“Dead?” Kakashi repeated sharply.

“I can move my shoulder, but not below it. I still have chakra, and I can use it, but I can’t channel it to my hand.” I tried, just to demonstrate; I could reach out with my kawarimi sense just fine, and add water to make chakra arms, but trying to cycle it through my system in preparation for a jutsu felt like getting to the top of the stairs and finding they were one shorter than they were meant to be. Jarring, and almost painful in the misstep. “I just…” I paused, trying to think how to phrase it. “I can’t feel my arm. It’s like I don’t have one.”

Kakashi was quiet, frowning as he thought. I recognised his expression; it was the same one he used in Wave, the one that said he was being serious and unreadable and not letting his emotions interfere. I fought the urge to swallow, and told myself that I found it comforting. It meant he was going to fix it. It was a good thing.

“How well can you fight with one hand?”

… or not. I blinked, thrown; I’d been hoping for him to take the seal off and give me my arm back. I didn’t want to be one handed forever. I was nowhere near good enough a ninja to cope with that kind of set back - and even if I was, it circled back round to the fact that someone else would be better, and Danzo, and fecking _eyes_.

I frowned, halting that thought and trying to think through the answer rationally. If Kakashi was asking, he thought it was plausible. So. Think. I couldn’t do one handed seals, but my only techniques that needed seals were the bubblehead jutsu - which would be devastating to lose, but if there were any jutsu I could learn to do one handed it would be that one - and the grand fireball, which was slow anyway. Immolation, maybe, but that wasn’t combat and I was pretty sure I could adapt it. For taijutsu I rarely blocked, preferring instead to rely on dodging and staying out of reach; I’d probably need to favour kunai over bare hands - hand - for close combat, but I could throw almost as well with my right hand as with my left. I’d just have to speed up how fast I could grab new shuriken to make up for only having one.

Honestly, the worst would be the loss to my balance, and how much I’d have to slow down to account for it. But my other mainstays - stealth, ambush, genjutsu - shouldn’t be affected.

That was a lie, the worst would be that I’d only have _one hand -_

“Decently,” I summarised. “Enough for missions.” C-ranks, at least. Normal c-ranks. Not Team Seven style c-ranks. I hesitated, but I was getting nothing from his expression, so. “I’ll get used to it,” I said. “I can train.” I didn’t want to. I wanted him to fix it. It was my _arm_ , even leaving Danzo aside there was a voice in the back of my mind that was screaming. I couldn’t lose my _arm_. It was right there! Attached! All fingers still in place, ninja get hurt and I know I was stupid but I didn’t want - I didn’t mean -

Naruto shifted, pressing against my side and grounding me, and I tried to be subtle about the shaky breath I let out. “It won’t be a problem,” I said, more firmly than I felt. If I had to wrestle my water-arm into a replacement for my dead one and learn to cast jutsu one handedly, then I would. If that’s what it took to stay with him and Sakura. 

I hadn’t thought it would _permanent_ -

“Ah,” Kakashi said, dropping some of his blankness from his expression. “No missions, Sasuke. Not until Konoha’s seal master’s cleared you for them. I meant for the preliminaries.”

“For… what?” The world reset, and I scrambled to fit this new information in.

“The bastard’s forfeiting,” Naruto said from behind me, his voice one step short of a growl.

“That’s not -”

“Sensei, a sannin tried to gouge my eye out with a shuriken,” I blurted, interrupting him. “I don’t care about getting promoted. I’m just trying to stay alive.”

I ignored the way Naruto’s rumbling growl choked off, all my attention focussed desperately on Kakashi. I couldn’t tell you why, but I needed him, on a level I couldn’t explain, to understand that I was serious about pulling out. That I knew when I was in too deep, that even if it was important for Sakura to advance because she had to change things and for Naruto to advance because people needed to recognise him - but me, I wanted to survive, I didn’t _care_ about anything else because even if Sakura and Naruto were important _I needed to survive._

His hand landed on my head, and I stilled. I hadn’t even realised I was shaking.

“I know,” he said, and if there was pain in his voice it was far hidden behind the certainty that I couldn’t hear it. “I know, Sasuke.”

I didn’t move out from under his hand, or try to shake him off. Nor did I lean into it, not quite. “So why are you making me fight?” I asked in a small voice.

“I’m not,” he said, and for a second his expression twisted in frustration. “Not every enemy will let you forfeit. If they attack, you have to be able to defend yourself until you’re safe to drop out the match. Do you understand? Even if you don’t want to fight, sometimes it’s the only way.”

He didn’t say, explicitly, that if Kabuto kept me in the preliminaries in the first place he probably wouldn’t let me avoid them so easily. I picked it up all the same, and I wondered if he’d been watching us and realised why I hadn’t already pulled out. He must’ve known we were there - he sent Urushi to us after all. Urushi in the arena, and all the dogs in the forest, and Tsuki before the exams even started. Even though it was cheating to have your sensei’s summons rescue you and make sure you reached the tower alive. Even though it flew in the face of everything clans stood for to let Sakura sign the dog contract in the first place. Even though.

I swallowed. “I understand,” I said. I allowed myself another beat, then tipped my head to shrug his hand off, and scowled half-heartedly when he messed my hair up before letting go.

“Watch your hip position,” he advised, slipping into a lighter version of his earlier professional tone. His face didn’t go blank though, and I let the tension drain out of me as I listened. “You’re going to be relying on your feet a lot. Try hooking them round your opponents legs, but be careful not to over balance - one arm makes it easy to fall on your bad side and hurt your neck.”

“Wouldn’t it be better to stay at a distance?” Naruto asked, glancing between us hesitantly. He wasn’t quite suspicious, and he’d stopped growling, but he didn’t look quite like he’d followed the same thought process I had. “If he’s trying to defend instead of win?”

Kakashi hummed. “Against some opponents,” he allowed. “Against others, defence just gives them the upper hand and turns into a stamina marathon.” He looked like he was going to say more, but the klaxon sounded from the arena - the set up time had passed, and the matches were ready to begin.

Temari’s match was over quickly. The rain nin - Ajisai, according to the announcer - was a taijutsu and sealing expert, and the similarity between her rain of shuriken and Tenten’s own extravagant weapon displays was striking.

“Are the matches rigged?” I asked, as Ajisai retrieved another seal from the sleeve of her purple haori and released a storm of paper that Temari blew away. Next to me, Shikamaru tilted his head, interested in the answer. Without knowing that Temari had fought Tenten before, I supposed the connection wasn’t so obvious - but it did seem telling that she’d been given an easy win both here and in canon.

“It’s certainly a thought,” Asuma answered, and I fought the urge to grimace. I’d been hoping Kakashi would pick up the question. “What makes you think it might be? And if it was, why do you think the village would do it?”

Screw it. Urges were not made to be suppressed. Let the grimace out and be free. “Never mind,” I said, turning back to the match. He could Teacher his own team, just because we trained and did missions with him didn’t make us his students.

“So they can control who wins?” Ino said, leaning forward with a frown. She was watching the fight intently; was she remembering facing Temari in the forest? “Or… if there are things they need to keep secret, they can make sure the matches don’t force someone to use a technique they shouldn’t.”

“To show off,” Sakura added, and I redirected my grimace at her. _Team Seven_ , damnit. Stop fraternising with the enemy. We were _Kakashi’s_ kids. “The exams are as much about politics as us getting promoted, each village would want to make itself look the best. Suna’s our ally and their Kazekage is here, so it makes sense for the Suna nin to be given good matches.”

“Both good points,” Asuma allowed. In the ring, Temari had opened another moon on her fan and unleashed a howling gale that Ajisai barely blocked with a summoned gate. “There’s a lot more to being chunin than fighting well, and the point of the matches is to see how people apply all aspects of their skills, not just the combat ones.” He smiled conspiratorially, then added, “Genins can be strong, but chunin need common sense.”

“If we had common sense,” I groused, “Then none of us would fight.” Hello world, allow me to demonstrate my strongest ability in front of a massive crowd, giving everyone watching ample time to come up with a counter before I actually meet them in battle. Or, if you were unlucky: hello world, allow me to die in a grand spectacle that does great things for the funeral industry but is otherwise meaningless and shit.

Asuma tilted his head. “The villages coming together for exams like this is an important part of peace,” he said, not quite chidingly, but definitely in a tone that wanted me to consider his point. I stared straight ahead and refused. “Without tournaments, the only way to tell who’s stronger is war.”

Another arena-destroying wind strike. Ajisai tried to block again, but it was blatantly obvious that Temari had been playing with her so far and she went flying, landing in a ragged heap and not getting up. The match was called in Temari’s favour, and from the way she had to be restrained by Hayate from another overkill blow, I gathered that she was feeling cheated by not getting the chance to properly fight.

Asuma was wrong. I didn’t know how to say it, because I was starting from a very different place to him. Ajisai, now being carried off by an equally purple-clad teammate, was from Rain, home of Akatsuki, and as far as I could work out their plan for world peace involved killing everyone who disagreed with them. The bijuu were meant to bring peace, and didn’t. The exams were meant to bring peace, and Orochimaru still tried to launch an invasion. It didn’t _work._

My eyes flicked up to the Kage’s box where the Kazekage and the Hokage were leaning towards each other to discuss something. The invasion was out of my hands; I _hoped_ I’d done enough by threatening Rasa and bringing him in line, but until the final round I’d have no way to actually tell. Should I do more? Visit him again as ANBU Weasel and check up on him? It sounded like the sort of bad idea that broke people’s cover, but the not knowing was painful. Where was Orochimaru now - was he in the audience somewhere, had he been the one to send Kabuto or had Kabuto done that on his own?

I pulled my thoughts back. Shikamaru was watching me, forehead wrinkled in a slight frown. I stuck my tongue out at him - there was no way he’d guess what I was _actually_ thinking, which meant he probably thought Asuma’s statement had troubled me. I cast around for something to say in answer.

“Weak people still go to war,” I settled for. “You can’t _scare_ them into obeying.” I looked back at the kage box, at the Sandaime, and my expression soured. “All you do is make them desperate.”

The sign over the end of the arena flashed, announcing the next match, and I abandoned the conversation to lean forward and read it.

“The second match,” Hayate’s magnified voice boomed. “Uzumaki Naruto vs Yakushi Kabuto.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Teams 7 and 10, shaken and struggling to come to grips with the fact that people die in this stupid exam and they potentially still might:  
> Sasuke: Excuse? Disallowed. My thing. Get your own.  
> Teams 7 and 10, failing to be bowled over by that utterly compelling argument:  
> Sasuke: _Mangos_ *jazz hands*


	27. Chapter 27

I stilled, heart suddenly racing. Kabuto. If these matches were rigged -

“Naruto,” I said, words tight and fast. “Don’t let him -”

“I know, bastard,” he said, flashing me a sharp-toothed grin over his shoulder. I made a frustrated sound and glared at him, willing him to see the danger.

“He’s not just a genin. You can’t -”

“Bastard,” he interrupted, turning and softening his smile. Hiding the fangs didn’t take away from the fact that they were there, and everything from the set of his shoulders to the tilt of his chin said he wasn’t going to back down. “I _know_.” He leapt down before I could answer that, leaving me gripping the railing too tight as I stared after him.

What, please, was he meant to _know_. That Kabuto was a spy? That Kabuto ended up a more dangerous threat than Orochimaru himself? That Kabuto was a medic interested in new and different ways to cheat death and achieve immortality, and that _bijuu-given healing powers_ might be of interest to him? If that even _was_ the reason they were fighting. If it wasn’t, I didn’t want to know what was. Naruto was an Uzumaki, a jinchuuriki, a, a - _fuck_ I couldn’t remember everything else. He was Konoha’s secret super weapon, and if Kabuto - if _Orochimaru_ \- were trying to test how much of a threat he was...

“Hey,” Sakura said quietly, coming up next to me. “He’ll be fine. Let him have this.”

“Let him have _what_?” I bit back, not untensing in the slightest. Kabuto had also reached the arena, and they were standing a comfortable distance away from each other, both seemingly relaxed. Kabuto’s posture was loose, almost slouched, head tilted forward so he was looking up through his glasses in a mimicry of weakness. Naruto was leaning back, arms crossed behind his head in a way that would look casual to anyone who didn’t recognise it as his clone-making pose, grin easy and eyes curved in something that was just a shade too watchful to be his usual squinty-eyed fake cheer.

“The matches aren’t to the death,” Sakura said, standing close enough to be friendly but not actually inside my personal space like Naruto would. She never did; at first, I thought it was because of her crush, but that was long gone. Maybe it was being the leader, being the one in charge who had to look out for us, maybe she felt she had to keep us at a distance. Maybe the way she acted was normal, and the way Naruto and I gravitated towards each other was not. I’d never had the same easy touches from her as I had from him, and I was surprised to realise how much at that moment I wanted them. I’d apparently got used to having someone in touching distance when I was stressed.

I ignored it. I wasn’t a little kid, getting frustrated at her for not knowing I wanted her closer when I hadn’t asked for it was stupid. Wanting people closer because life was shit and Naruto didn’t seem to realise what kind of enemy Kabuto was was stupid. Wanting people was stupid. I was just - I was having a bad day. Ignore it.

“There are other things than dying,” I said, scowling at her. “I know Naruto won’t die. That’s not the issue.”

In the arena, Hayate called the start. Neither of them moved. An orange hawk appeared in the air, high enough up that the puff of smoke from its creation and almost instantaneous henge went unnoticed by most of the audience - though Kabuto’s eyes flicked up to it and back down, a tiny movement that should have been impossible to see from this distance.

I slammed the dark-eyes genjutsu down over my eyes. Fuck’s sake. Whoever designed the sharingan was an idiot; who linked a technique to someone’s emotional state and forgot to include a flashing neon sign to tell them when it had been activated? Particularly given I was trying to _hide_ the damn thing. I swear half the time I turned it on I didn’t even _realise_ until I twigged that I was seeing things I shouldn’t be able to. Who _did_ that. What kind of -

Kabuto moved. He went in fast and low; taijutsu only, a brutal style that relied on one or two viciously accurate strikes before dodging out of range. If Naruto hadn’t been familiar with that sort of attack from fighting me the match could easily have finished then, but luckily for Naruto he knew how to deal with it. One clone summoned to block a killing blow that was too fast to duck under; a sweeping kick for the legs; another clone in the form of a spiked chain to extend his reach when Kabuto backed off - in total it was maybe four seconds, then they were back to watching each other again.

Naruto, I knew, preferred to wait and counter, turning an opponent’s attacks against them, but Kabuto’s thoughtful frown worried me. In just that one exchange he’d learnt that Naruto used clones far better than anyone had any right to, and that his henge - at least for his clones - was solid. He’d learnt that Naruto’s chakra was quicker to react than his muscles were, and that Naruto was passably accurate with a chain but certainly no weapon master. What else had he learnt? What was he _looking_ to learn?

“Look,” Sakura said, touching her fingers briefly against my elbow to get my attention. “They’re watching him.”

I glanced up at the audience. They were. We were in a public display match. I failed to see the relevance.

My lack of revelation must’ve shown, because Sakura raised an eyebrow at me. “I thought you were the one who said the exams were still important.”

Kabuto abandoned taijutsu in favour of distance, throwing a series of shuriken in a tight formation designed to disguise the trick-shot curving round the back. I recognised that, too; shurikens were my jam, and unfortunately for Kabuto, that meant that - again - Naruto knew how to counter. He clapped his hands together and blew, scattering the weapons with his gust of wind, then spread his palms almost in a mimicry of Temari’s fan and turned the air into a percussive blast that Kabuto had to leap away from and crouch high on the wall to avoid.

Sakura was still watching me, splitting her focus between me and the match. “Fine, yes,” I allowed ungraciously. “You need to be promoted so you can fix things. What’s your point.”

“I don’t - nevermind. The point is that if Naruto wants to be Hokage, people need to see him as someone who could become one. The exams aren’t just to show off to our _enemies_.”

I paused, swallowing my instinctive response. It wasn’t _Naruto’s_ fault that everyone had the wrong impression of him. They were idiots. He shouldn’t have to jump through hoops just to prove that he was worthy of their respect. But Sakura knew that; she also knew that whether it was his fault or not, Naruto still had an uphill battle to get people’s attention.

It was weirdly jarring to remember, again, that not everyone was living through the same life-or-death-or-eyeballs situation I was, and that no one else had an invasion hanging over their heads. No one else from Konoha, at least. If Kabuto was just a dick who’d used killing intent on a fellow genin, then the most important part of Naruto’s fight was exactly what the exam intended: to show off his skills and strategy.

As if echoing that, he filled the arena with a thick sea of orange. One transformation technique later, and each clone became mist, thick and still glaringly orange - I didn’t even know he could do that. Whether it was an outer layer made to look like mist or whether he’d actually managed to henge into a semi-solid state I wasn't sure, but either way it achieved his purpose of hiding him from view.

And, from the murmurs spreading through the audience, of catching people’s attention. Sakura wasn’t wrong in what she said. Just - _Kabuto_. I wished I could tell them what was happening. I wished - it wasn’t that I didn’t trust them. I did. But I couldn’t tell them. It wasn’t up for debate, it wasn’t on the cards; there is no way to have a conversation that starts, _I’ve been lying since the day we met_.

God. How paranoid did I look from the outside? I ran scared from everything. And when I didn’t run, I treated every attacker like the end of the world, you had to beat them or die trying because if you failed you died anyway so what’s the point? I remembered there was a phrase, but I couldn’t remember how it went. It’s still paranoia even if they’re out to get you? It’s not paranoia if they’re actually out to get you? Either way, I could be self aware enough to know that I couldn’t sustain it. 

I wanted it to _stop._

“Why didn’t you just say that?” I asked tiredly. Kabuto used some kind of area effect ninjutsu to clear Naruto’s mist. It revealed a dozen of him, no way to tell which was the original. “You sound like Kakashi. What’s wrong with just saying things instead of being cryptic about them all the time?”

A pause, then Kabuto did another jutsu, flashing through hand seals and somehow disappearing in the aftermath. My sharingan had deactivated, I couldn’t see what he did or even guess at the element he’d used. I had some of his taijutsu and shuriken skills memorised but that didn’t help, given that they were almost identical to my own. Still, I didn’t need my sharingan to recognise the way the Narutos tensed; he was listening, maybe smelling - I’d never worked out exactly which of his senses the kyuubi heightened. Overhead, the hawk hovered in place, though while the clone was still active Naruto wouldn’t have any way of knowing what it saw.

“Sorry,” Sakura said, grimacing. “I didn’t mean to be cryptic. I guess I did sound like Kakashi.”

Wherever Kabuto was hiding, Naruto couldn’t find him. He frowned, and half the versions of him created other clones beneath them to lift them off the floor. They henged into my kitchen stool, of all things, but it wasn’t a bad strategy; if Sakura disappeared mid spar, she was usually waiting to come up from underground.

“If we’re being straight forward though,” Sakura continued, ignoring my lack of response. “Then I think Naruto’s pretty happy he’s facing this guy.”

I blinked. “Why?”

The hawk dispelled; eleven of the Narutos didn’t react, but one - the original - leapt from his orange stool a second before Kabuto dropped from above. The water jutsu Kabuto landed with wiped out the clones, and without them Naruto bolted, Kabuto in hot pursuit. Naruto threw a wind jutsu behind him - Kabuto dodged - a sloppy trio of orange kunai - Kabuto dodged - split off another clone and rapidly changed direction - Kabuto killed the clone and followed the original -

Sakura punched me lightly on the arm. “Sometimes you’re so dense, Sasuke-chan. Kabuto attacked you. Naruto’s pissed. Beating people up is how he shows he cares.”

“ _What?_ ”

In the arena, Kabuto came close enough to reach out with a glowing, scalpel-tipped hand; Naruto turned with a wicked grin and slammed his fingers into the cross seal; the floor where they were standing exploded upwards in a writhing tangled _mess_ of orange clone-wire and Kabuto’s bitten off curse was amplified around the stadium. He sliced at them, but as quickly as his scalpels dispelled the clones more took their place. I couldn’t tell - had Naruto already made them? He must’ve done, he couldn’t be reforming them and henging them this fast. It was almost like watching Gaara’s sand envelope a person except luridly coloured and marginally less lethal.

“Holy shit,” someone said behind us. Ino? “Kakashi, what are you _training_ them for?” Oh, Asuma.

“He worked that one out himself,” Kakashi replied, though he still sounded smug about it.

“Do you yield?” Naruto asked. He hadn’t dropped from his position, but his posture was aggressively confident in a way that almost invited Kabuto to say no.

Weighed down by what had to be at least a hundred henged clones, Kabuto yielded. “Ah, I guess you’re too strong for me,” he said, tilting his head so the light flashed off his glasses. “I can’t beat you. I yield.”

_Lie_ , a small part of me identified. Kabuto held off a sannin. But even so: Naruto’s win was undeniably impressive. As was the way he paused, then nodded his acceptance - as though he could have kept fighting if he wanted to, as though Hayate and the exam didn’t matter, it was his word that ended the fight. He released the clones in a way that deliberately left Kabuto sprawling, and when he offered him a hand to pull him up he dipped his head to say something too low for the amplifiers to pick up. Whatever it was had Kabuto smiling gratingly back and raising his hands disarmingly, so I could at least vaguely guess at the message.

I glanced over at Sakura. She had her own grin, just a hint too victorious as she narrowed her eyes at Kabuto, and I wondered madly if Naruto was the only one who was glad of the way the matchup had gone.

I scowled. “I don’t need people defending my honour. You and Naruto don’t need to beat people up because they were rude to me.”

On my other side, Shikamaru choked. I ignored him. Me getting mad at idiots who insulted people I liked was an entirely different thing and he should stop seeing parallels where they didn’t exist.

“Sasuke-chan,” Sakura started, then decided to abandon what she was going to say in favour of shaking her head and smiling at me. “Sometimes,” she said instead, repeating her early statement, “You are _so_ dense. You’re our friend. We love you. Go tell Naruto congratulations for winning his match.”

I blinked at her. She kept smiling. I nodded, mechanically, and aimed for the stairs. Behind me Ino said something and Sakura replied, but I focussed on Naruto and didn’t listen.

“Ok, bastard?” he said, grinning, and dropped an arm over my shoulders. “Did you see?”

“I saw,” I promised him. He was practically sparkling in his enthusiasm, and I couldn’t help it: I smiled at him, off kilter enough to offer a huff of laughter. “I saw - what _was_ that, you maniac.”

“That was awesome, bastard, that’s what. Do you have any idea how hard it is to learn to hover? You think, bird, it’ll be fine, birds fly all the time - but _hovering_ is like, it’s a whole new skill, believe it.”

_We love you_.

But. I wanted to go. Konoha wasn’t safe.

“The bird was cool,” I agreed. “The actual match...” I made a teasing so-so gesture and grinned when he jokingly pushed me away.

“Sakura-chan, tell the bastard I was awesome. Except for when he came out the _sky_ , I thought for sure he’d be underground - hey, do you think it’s a wind technique? Could I learn hiding in the sky like you hide in the ground? There’s nothing to hide behind though.”

We love you.

“The third match,” Hayata said, bringing all of our attention back to the arena. Naruto slotted in next to me, as little regard for personal space as he ever had. I didn’t move away. “Suiren of Rain versus Shigeri of Grass.”

I tuned them out; the guy from grass was one of the three we’d taken the earth scroll off, and both Sakura and Naruto clearly recognised him. I didn’t know anything about his fighting style - I’d been busy threatening his teammate - and the kunoichi from Rain was only notable that she was another kunoichi, which meant Rain had broken the tradition of one girl per team.

It was a shame, really, that Akatsuki were set on world domination. Rain liked kunoichi and had coordinating purple outfits. I could get behind that.

I watched the fight with half an eye. Suiren was apparently a water user - apt, given her name - and fought with, of all things, an umbrella. Still, the hail of senbon was kind of cool, and seemed to be giving Shigeri a hard time so. Good for her.

It wasn’t that… It wasn’t that I didn’t _know_ they cared for me. I mean. Teammates. Deeper and more complicated than friendship, and I was well aware that Naruto had latched onto the concept of precious people to an almost alarming degree. It’s just. It’s just, what the hell did I do with it? Love was… God, I didn’t want them to love me. Did I? Love had too many strings attached. You love someone, you give them power over you - I didn’t _want_ that kind of responsibility in my life. Was I meant to reciprocate? If I didn’t, would I hurt them? If I did -

But was it actually any different? They’d already said in the forest. They’d be hurt if I died. I didn’t want them to hurt. I didn’t want to _die_ either, but that was kind of a given and not really relevant, so. 

Except no. _No_ , it _was_ relevant, it was the whole fucking point - I _didn’t want to die._ I didn’t want to die, so I had to leave, I had to get out of this fucking _shithole_ where I wasn’t safe - why the fuck was Orochimaru even here, it’s not like I needed _more_ people in my life who saw me as a pair of eyeballs with some disposable schmuck stuck holding onto them. I didn’t - that was the whole _point_. It had been the point since I was seven years old. It hadn’t _stopped_ being the fucking point because someone decided to base their happiness on my continued existence, what kind of - how blind did you have to fucking be to pick me? What kind of selfish prick - you love me? You _love_ me? I don’t - I love my _brother_ , that’s all I can manage, you can’t ask me to - I can’t - fuck’s _sake_ I _can’t_ -

Someone sat down next to me and I couldn’t stop myself flinching. I grappled desperately with myself, trying to reign in the damn panic that was flailing its way through my brain. What was _wrong_ with me. I was all over the place and frustration at being unable to calm down just made it worse, if Sakura or Naruto even so much as looked at me I’d lose my grip and just start crying and I didn’t know if I’d apologise and tell them I loved them too or scream at them to back off because -

“Hey,” Chouji said, voice tilted low. “You want a chip?”

I blinked. In front of me, I saw a confusing mess of nothing recogniseable. I almost blinked at it again, except I thought the colour was familiar.

“They’re not great,” Chouji continued in the same low voice. It was an effort to pick him out among the crowd, and I strained my ears to listen. “They’re from the vending machine. Maybe we should take it over and put better ones in, I think this packet’s mostly air.”

Dog hairs. I was seeing dog hairs. And once I worked that out, they resolved themselves from dog hairs to dog, and from dog, laboriously, to Pakkun. He was sprawled out over my lap, eyes closed, as if he’d gone to sleep an hour ago and left his legs stretched all over the place. He was practically falling off, and his head was upside down. I shifted to support it better and he whuffled in his sleep.

He wasn’t asleep. I couldn't see the arena, but it had to be the same match, and I’d been standing up at the start of it. I didn’t remember sitting down, but there definitely hadn’t been enough time for him to sleep.

“It’s so the chips don’t break,” I managed, interrupting whatever Chouji had moved on to saying. He paused, and tilted his head to listen. “The air. They fill the packets with air so the chips don’t end up in pieces.”

“They need better chips then,” he said. “We don’t put this much air in ours. Maybe it’s because it’s a vending machine, I think there’s something about stopping them going stale. What if we had a food stall? I bet people would want hot food. I’d want hot food. Okonomiyaki. And a crepe cart. You could put fruit in yours.”

“I like fruit,” I agreed. The chip packet appeared in my vision again and I took one on auto pilot, eating it without really registering the taste. Though he was right; they weren’t as good as the ones he usually had. I glanced over to see what the packet was, and noticed that his hand was sweaty and he was leaning more against the back of the bench for support than he usually would.

“You need the hospital.” I meant it, and I was worried, but it came out oddly flat and distant. “How long does your soldier pill last?”

“Long enough. I’m fine, don’t worry - I know what my limit feels like, I won’t push myself past it.”

“I think I already did,” I said without thinking. Then amended, “I’m not. I’m - shit. Sorry, Chouji. Ignore me. I’m being an idiot.”

He hummed. “I don’t think you’re an idiot,” he said. “You reckon they’ll have better food in the hospital? I’ve never had to stay for a meal.”

And - that was it. Team Seven was messy and emotional and so important it hurt, but Chouji just liked sharing chips. I loved Chouji. I loved - did he know? How much I loved him? No strings attached, no responsibilities, I didn’t expect him to do anything about it, I just - I loved him. And Pakkun, who’d managed to oh so casually move his paw so his soft paw pads were resting against my fingers. And - Naruto and Sakura were standing by the rail, pretending to watch the match with a studied enthusiasm that wouldn’t even fool the fish, let alone any ninja walking past. They were angled to both be facing in slightly different directions, their shoulders tilted out even while their attention was supposedly caught on whatever was happening in the arena, and if you ignored their deliberately calm expressions you’d mistake them for holding a defensive guard.

It twisted in my stomach. How could I say I loved them, if I knew that leaving would hurt them and I was going to do it anyway. How could I say I was going to leave if I loved them.

“They have pudding,” I said, obliging Pakkun with his scritches and turning back to Chouji. “I think it’s chocolate? They might have other flavours.”

“Chocolate pudding.” He considered it. “That’s not so bad. We could get takeaway though, right? I know medics are meant to be strict but they wouldn’t mind takeaway.”

“I’ll sneak some in for you,” I promised.

He smiled at me. “That’d be nice. Thank you. We could have pork buns, and mochi. Sorry for not getting any, the vending machine only has chips and soda.”

_Mochi_. Chouji, what the hell. I didn’t want to cry. “You’ll just have to take it over,” I said. “Start a vending machine business and make sure you can get mochi anywhere in the village. It’s a human right. No one would stop you.”

“I’d stop me,” he protested. “I prefer restaurants. Also I’d be rubbish at a business, get Ino to do it. Though, maybe ask her later.”

I wrinkled my nose. “Later? Why?”

“Because -”

“ _Forehead_ ,” Ino gushed, throwing herself back into the group in a sweaty, bleeding sprawl. “I'm in love. She's beautiful. When she jumped up - her scroll! I need to know how she does that. You’re amazing, I love how you punch things, but we’re too comfortable fighting against each other. I need a real rival in my life and I’ve _found her_.”

What. The hell?

“You missed her match,” Pakkun said from my lap, keeping his eyes screwed shut in a pretence at still being asleep even while he squirmed his way to the best position for belly rubs. “She fought one of the other leaf puppies and lost.”

“She doesn’t seem to mind,” I said for want of a better response, watching in mild alarm as Ino draped herself dramatically over the railing and started sighing about _that thing with the bo-staff I could swoon_ and _seriously, taijutsu goals, do you think she’d spar with me if I bribed her._ “Who was she against?”

“Tenten, I think?” Chouji said. “I didn’t recognise her, but she looked about our age. Maybe she was in the year above at the academy?”

“Tenten,” I repeated. _Tenten_. What the hell. I mean, she was an excellent weapon user and with Gai as a sensei her taijutsu would hardly _not_ be brutal, but there was something so weird about the fact that Ino hadn’t faced Sakura. Not that any of the other matches had lined up to what they’d been before, and Tenten was still a leaf ninja which made sense; no one wanted a Yamanaka rifling through their minds at the best of times, letting Ino fight someone from another village was probably a diplomatic nightmare.

Speaking of Sakura, she was pulling Ino off the railings with an eyeroll and an instruction to stop bleeding everywhere. If she was threatened by her best friend declaring that she had a new rival, she didn’t show it. Which was probably for the best, even if Ino had acquired the new rival by getting the shit beaten out of her. Did Tenten even know she’d gained a fan? Seriously, all those years at the academy with Ino fixating on me like she had - could I have avoided them if I’d told Sakura to fight her properly instead?

“Chouji, in the nicest possible way, your teammate is nuts.”

“She is, isn’t she?” he answered, and dammit he sounded _pleased_.

At the risk of sounding repetitive, what, pray tell, the hell. 

After Ino was Kankuro, fighting the other of the two boys from Grass. Kankuro won fairly easily, and after him Tsurugi Misumi fought Fuyo, the last of the team from Rain - and, I was surprised to note, another kunoichi. I’d thought the girl-boy-boy or all boy formation was standard given how many other villages seemed to follow it; maybe Rain was odd in that way, or maybe I’d just been paying less attention than I should have been? She lost, unfortunately, and Misumi advanced; he was one of the other two on Kabuto’s team, the one that stretched himself like putty, and though I hadn’t actually interacted with him there would have been something cathartic about him being humiliatingly beaten.

Still, though, the match after that was Lee against Yoroi Akado, the other of Kabuto’s teammates (I was _pretty_ sure both of them were also traitors? I couldn’t remember precisely, but just being on his team was enough for me not to like them) and there my wishes of a humiliating defeat were well and truly fulfilled. Lee _demolished_ him. He had the chakra absorbing, sure, but you can’t absorb what you can’t catch; Lee didn’t even take his weights off and his speed levels were still awe inspiring. It almost - _almost -_ made up for the way he thought he could win Sakura’s heart by beating me in a spar, or whatever ridiculous notion he’d come up with when he quite literally crashed into us before the exam. Something about youth. I’d blocked it out of my memory. If Ino’s newfound destiny to train with Tenten brought Lee’s insanity back into my life, there’d be hell, and I wouldn’t be the one suffering from it.

Somehow. I’d work the specifics out later, and with any luck Kakashi would be able to help.

With Lee’s match won, it left six of us still to fight. Me, Sakura, Shikamaru, and Neji on the Konoha front, plus Gaara and the red haired kunoichi from Grass. It didn’t really matter to me who I was paired with; if it was Sakura I’d do my best to fight so she could demonstrate how completely she outclassed everyone else, but with the others I’d forfeit straight away. Provided Gaara would let me, though I didn’t _think_ he’d try to stop me. In the slight pause after Lee’s match - he’d slammed Yoroi so hard against the wall that they’d needed a doton user to come and fix the crevice - I nudged Pakkun over to Chouji and leaned out over the railing to see if I could see where Gaara was. His red hair should at least be visible given how rare it was, but I didn’t spot him and I didn’t feel like activating my eyes to check.

Sakura put her elbows on the railing next to me, staring out the other side of the arena.

“Sorry,” she said, quietly enough that the others couldn’t hear it. Another day, I might have reacted, but if I let myself think too hard about the love problem I’d just go round in circles again and I didn’t want to. It was easier to pretend it didn’t exist, so I just turned my head to her curiously.

“What for? You didn’t do anything.”

She made an unhappy noise, but kept looking forward. “Something’s wrong. And I don’t have a bloodline so maybe I don’t understand, but I don’t think it’s that. Or not only that. And I’m not - I’m not saying this because I want you to tell me or because it’s an excuse for not being able to help, I just…” Her face twisted down in a frustrated frown. “I don’t know what to do and I want to help but I’m not and I’m sorry.”

I watched her for a long second, mind too tired to fully work through everything that meant. I saw Naruto over her shoulder, subtly checking on us and shifting like he wanted to come over but had been told to stay put. “Yeah,” I said turning forward again. “Something’s wrong. Don’t be sorry. It’s not your fault.”

“That’s not how it works,” she protested. Then, hesitantly, “What can I do?”

What could she do. Million dollar question. Complicated answer. I shrugged, because _hell if I knew_ wasn't what she was looking for, and just then what I actually wanted from her was, “Come see the fish? They’re nice, I promise. They like it if you give them ripples to play with, but mostly all they want is food.”

In the arena, the doton user finished patching the wall. The next match would start soon.

“... The fish,” Sakura repeated, nodding, and to her credit she didn’t ask why. “Ok. I thought you didn’t like fish?”

“They grew on me. It’s not their fault they live underwater and can’t leave their pond.”

“The next match,” Hayate said, restarting the jutsu that powered the announcement board. I leaned back and caught Naruto’s eye; the speed with which he turned his head towards us showed how closely he had to have been watching, and I felt a flicker of what might’ve been guilt before I squashed it. Things were bad enough as it was, it was shit that I made him feel like he had to stay away for fear of upsetting me but it was shit that my brain decided to let itself be upset. Unless the guilt would help me work out how to fix things, I didn’t want it. I raised an eyebrow at him instead and offered a small smile, and he grinned at me in relief in return.

“Uchiha Sasuke -” I looked forward but stayed loose and relaxed because I’d meant it when I said I didn’t care about the match. “- against Uzumaki Karin.”

What.

My hands gripped the railing and my eyes went wide in surprise. _What_. “Uzumaki?” someone said, and I could feel the attention shifting to Naruto. Across the other side of the room I saw Karin get up and start making her way down to the arena - red hair, how could I not have twigged the red hair, hadn’t I literally just been thinking about how rare it was? - and I realised with a kind of numb disbelief that it was the grass kunoichi I’d threatened in the forest.

“Oh my god.”

“Bastard,” Naruto said urgently, coming up behind me. “That’s -”

“I held a kunai to her neck,” I said distantly. “Naruto, I held a kunai to your cousin’s neck.”

“We don’t know she’s his cousin,” Sakura said, but she sounded as shocked as the rest of us.

“She said I wouldn’t kill her,” I continued, “Because I was Konoha and she thinks Konoha’s soft, but I said I was Uchiha and I would and she hates me.”

“You didn’t though. I was there, you just knocked her out. Maybe she doesn’t hate you.”

I made a distressed noise, because he was right. He _had_ been there - or a clone of him at least - which meant Karin probably hated him too and that wasn’t right. “I’ll talk to her,” I promised, belatedly checking my dead arm was still strapped down and hopping onto the railing in preparation to drop down for the match. “She’s family, she should know you’re good.”

“Bastard wait -”

I grabbed one of the pieces of debris (there were a lot to choose from) and kawarimid in to stand opposite her, more because the stairs took too long and I’d already dawdled than for any kind of dramatic entrance. From the way her expression soured though when she saw me I guessed it didn’t quite come across.

Hayate nodded at both of us. “Put your hand up to yield and make sure you say it clearly,” he instructed. “If your opponent has yielded, any further attacks against them will be stopped. Do not use jutsu or weapons that will harm the audience, and if you fall unconscious, it will count as a loss. Understood?”

“Perfectly,” Karin spat, glaring. I nodded, wide eyed, trying to see the similarities between her and Naruto now I knew to look for them. It was hard to see with her glasses but her eyes, maybe, turned up the same at the corners, and though Naruto was more tanned Karin’s pale skin and red hair was an almost perfect match to Kushina’s.

“Very well,” Hayate said, stepping back and tapping his cheek to reactivate his amplifier seal. “Begin!”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sasuke: my brother killed the clan because he loves me and i've been lying to people for years because i love him. the concept of other people loving me is dangerous and terrifying in a way i don't fully understand or know how to deal with, and when i say i love chouji i have to specify that it's not a love that demands anything of him. the idea of him loving me back is - alien. outside the realms of possibility. so obviously not the case that it didn't even occur to me to mention it in my thoughts. love is complicated, and threatening, and too important to mess around with.
> 
> Ino: I see a taijutsu queen, I get utterly _destroyed_ by a taijutsu queen, I am in love.


	28. Chapter 28

I didn’t move straight away, holding myself tense and ready to dodge while my mind scrambled to work out how to do this. If I forfeited, I doubted I’d get another chance to talk to Karin. But given that one of the points on my list was to apologise for threatening to kill her, I didn’t think that holding her at knife point and forcing her to listen would go down well.

“Karin,” I started carefully, keeping my voice low enough that it wouldn’t be broadcast to the audience. “Can we -” I ducked first the kunai she threw, then the high kick she followed it with. _Talk_ , I’d been going to say, but I guessed the answer was no. “Wait,” I tried, spinning out the way of another blow. “Wait, I don’t - _shit_.” I went to deflect a punch on instinct and forgot that arm didn’t work, and resorted to dropping down and swapping out with a loose piece of rubble behind her. At least in that Lee had done me a favour - I had pretty much full maneuverability over the field with my kawarimi thanks to the amount of damage he’d done to the floor, and I used my new position to sweep a foot strike at her ankles and switch out of range when she stumbled.

“I don’t want to fight,” I said hurriedly. “I’m sorry for taking your scroll, I didn’t know who you were.”

“The fuck does that have to do with anything,” she snarled, regaining her balance. “You think I’m mad about the _scroll_?”

Okay, no, that was fair. “And threatening to kill you. I was never actually going to, I swear, and neither was -” Dodge, again; her taijutsu was decently fast and each strike was powerful, but her attacks were poorly linked together and she wasn’t following through with any openings she made. At a guess, she’d been given rudimentary instruction and otherwise left to teach herself, and I wondered why Grass had bothered to send her to the exams if they’d been so lax in preparing her.

“Neither was Naruto,” I continued from her other side. “He - would you _stop_ that?”

“What, so you can win? Fuck off and die, Leaf.”

I switched, _again,_ this time avoiding the spray of shuriken she’d flung at me, and landed in close enough to make a grab for her weapons pouch. “I’m not _Leaf_ ,” I hissed. “I told you, I’m Uchiha. Give me - _thank_ you _._ ”

Naturally, she flashed her hands through an earth jutsu and pelted me with rocks, and I was annoyed enough to use her own shuriken from the pouch I’d stolen and throw them back at her. Annoyed enough, apparently, to misjudge how fast she could evade, and though one of the shuriken skimmed past her thigh and left a thin trail of blood in its wake the other thudded into her chest and stuck there.

“Fuck’s _sake_ did no one ever teach you to duck - don’t pull it out! The hell are you -”

She bit her forearm viciously, glaring at me as she did so, and I faltered. It was a hell of a way to stare someone down. It also made what had been a serious wound in her chest close up and stop bleeding, so points, but also, ew. “Listen,” I said, trying to cram as many words into the short break as possible. “I’m really not trying to hurt you. You’re Uzumaki. Uchiha like Uzumaki. Naruto’s Uzumaki. You’re cousins. We should -” She finished healing; I switched, and dodged, and privately thought that she and Naruto would get on just fine. Both of them were stubborn and fucking relentless, they’d love each other.

“You’re really not trying to hurt me?” she repeated scornfully, and I winced, because when she said it like _that_ it did sound a bit patronising. But - come on. She just wasn’t that good at taijutsu. I couldn’t remember if she got better later, but at the moment she hadn’t been trained nearly enough and even with one arm down I’d easily kept her from landing a single hit.

“Look, just talk to Naruto, ok? He’s better at it than me. He -” The chain appeared out of nowhere, slamming into the side with my bad arm hard enough that even though the arm was numb I felt the impact in my _ribs_. I’m pretty sure she cracked them with the force of it, and I scrambled into a kawarimi right to the edge of the arena wall.

Ok. So. This was not going well.

“Bastard!” Naruto yelled from above me, and I craned my head back to look up at him. “Stop getting hurt!”

“ _No,_ ” I gasped, feigning shock. “You think? You know I _never thought of that._ ”

“Damnit, I meant -” I switched again, cutting him off, and Karin’s chain buried itself in the wall where I’d been standing. How many kawarimis in a row was this? I couldn’t keep going forever. Nor could I talk to her from this distance, and honestly, I probably had a better chance of fighting her if I got in close and forced her to fall back on taijutsu.

I came in low again, aiming for her legs. “I’m not your enemy,” I said, hooking my foot behind her knee and unbalancing her. “I’m not trying to recruit you or mess with your head.” Elbow up, forcing her chin back and making her abandon her punch to block me. “I just want you to talk to your cousin, ok? Just _talk_.” Turn the elbow strike into a grab for her shoulder, twisting as I pulled it down and forced her to the floor. She retaliated by recalling the chain and using the momentum of it to swing the end at my head like a club. I barely slapped it aside with my own arm of water chakra before it could crush my face, and I took a moment while I had her pinned to stare at the crater it left beside us in shock.

“Holy shit that’s overpowered. Are all Uzumaki this insanely strong? Don’t answer that, that’s a stupid question.”

“Do you ever shut up,” she hissed. I blinked at her in surprise.

“Yes? I’m the quiet one.”

“ _Bullshit._ ”

She struggled, but with both knees pinning her torso and my good hand still holding her shoulder down with the forearm angled across her throat, she wasn’t going anywhere.

“Stay,” I told her. She snapped her teeth at me and growled. Rude. I shifted awkwardly until I replaced the hand on her shoulder with one of my knees, keeping her chain held down with my chakra arm to stop her attacking with it again. This would be a really useful time to have both hands working, but seeing as I only had one and needed it, this would have to do.

“I’m not giving up,” she said. “Just because you think you’ve won -”

“ _Talk._ To your damn _cousin._ Family’s important, even if they’re as annoying as you.”

“ _Annoying -_ ”

I raised my hand, turning my head to seek out Hayate. “I forfeit,” I said once I’d found him, pitching my voice to be picked up by the amplifiers and heard round the stadium. Karin bit off the rest of her sentence with a startled inhalation, but I didn’t look at her.

Hayate hesitated. “Are you sure?” he asked, eyes flicking between Karin and me in a way that said he’d happily call the match in my favour if I asked.

I resisted the urge to roll my eyes and be sarcastic. Barely, but I still did it. “I forfeit,” I repeated. “Uzumaki wins.” And, though it was probably a mistake, I let both her and her chain go and pushed myself to my feet, then gave her a final nod and turned to walk back to the stands.

There was a pause. Then, “Winner,” Hayate announced - though he still sounded dubious about it - “Uzumaki Karin.”

Stupid. He wouldn’t be dubious if _he’d_ been the one fighting that chain. Did the entire world have a thing against giving Uzumaki kids proper training? Karin and Naruto both, born with ridiculous advantages that should’ve seen them basically unstoppable by this stage except no one had bothered to show them what to do with it. Naruto at least had a few months with us to rectify, but what were Grass _doing_ with Karin? It wasn’t like she had a bijuu in her that they were scared of like Naruto had, so what was their excuse?

“Hey.”

I froze for a second and nearly stumbled.

“ _Hey._ ”

They were Uzumaki. Someone _had_ been scared enough of them - of the whole clan - and the result was the destruction of Whirlpool. Maybe it hadn’t been the same as the betrayal the Uchiha had faced, but. In a way, it was, and I couldn’t deny the sudden surge of kinship I felt towards them for it. Both of them, even if Karin hated me. Clan wasn’t about _getting along_ with people, it was about having their backs against whichever village was mistreating them, and even if I couldn’t remember enough about Karin from canon to know for sure that Grass counted - wasn’t she meant to be with Orochimaru? - I had the evidence at least to say that she wasn’t being treated as well as she deserved.

“Hey _asshole_ , what gives you the right to just forfeit and _walk away_ like that?” She grabbed my shoulder - the bad one, and the parts of it that weren’t numb twinged painfully - and yanked me round to face her.

“Karin,” I said, surprised and hiding my wince. “Why are you here?”

She glared. “Are you kidding me? I wasn’t done! You don’t get to spout all this crap about family and then fuck off like it doesn’t matter.”

I… what? I tried to read her expression, but she was wielding her anger like a defensive mask and I couldn’t see past it. “I literally said though,” I protested. “Family’s important. Of course it matters. Go find Naruto, make him explain.” I looked back over my shoulder to see where he was, and Karin made a frustrated sound and moved to block my gaze.

“Yeah and then you forfeited and went all dramatic and quit on me like some tragic hero. Don’t talk big if you don’t mean it, dick.”

I glared back at her, my own frustration rising. “I’m neither tragic nor hero,” I said. “I’m _Uchiha_. If anyone’s dramatic it’s -”

“Finish that sentence, _Uchiha,_ I fucking dare -”

“Bastard!” Naruto announced, stepping between us with a grin that was entirely too cheerful to be real. Also the fangs were back. Had the fangs ever actually gone? If he wasn’t careful he’d end up stuck with them like an Inuzuka. “Good fight. Thank you for talking to her for me. Next time please forfeit _before_ you get hurt. Let’s go.”

“Ex _cuse_ me?” Karin sputtered. I stepped round them both.

“Karin, this is your cousin. Naruto, I know, but I brought you a cousin. Go me.” I made vague shooing motions at them and started walking up the steps again to our seats. “Play nice, kids.”

“You didn’t _bring_ me anywhere,” Karin said hotly, jogging to keep up. Naruto appeared on my other side just as quickly, and I couldn’t tell if the expression he wore was an oh-my-god-a- _cousin_ expression or a bastard- _no_ expression. If it was the latter, that was unfair, because had he seriously _expected_ me to just forfeit and walk away at the start of the match? I just got you a damn present you berk, stop focussing on the negatives.

“Next match,” Hayate announced as we reached the part of the stands we’d claimed. Karin hesitated, clearly remembering that she’d just followed an enemy and was now faced with not only two teams from another village but also their senseis - which was ridiculous, we wouldn’t let anyone do anything to her. I took advantage though and sidled past her to sit with Sakura, holding myself still with remarkable calm when the first thing she did was lean back so Kakashi could check the damage Karin did to my arm.

“Nara Shikamaru versus Sabaku no Gaara!”

Silence. Shikamaru looked like he was going to throw up. Chouji went impossibly paler, and he was already pretty wan to start with.

“Forfeit,” I blurted. “You don’t even want to be chunin.”

“That’s Shikamaru’s call,” Asuma chided me, though he did at least seem troubled. I ignored him; he didn’t know Gaara, he hadn’t been in the forest when Shikamaru last faced him and nearly died. I didn’t know what Team Ten had told him or how much he’d learnt from other sources, but his starting point was that the exams mattered, and as far as I was concerned that was fundamentally wrong.

“You have to forfeit,” I insisted. “It’s not worth dying for.” Or risking dying, or - I trusted Gaara, and he’d backed off every time so far I’d told him to, but that didn’t make me blind. Facing him was a risk, and if Shikamaru actually tried to attack him - worse, if he _succeeded_ \- no. Not worth it.

“Shikamaru knows how he fights though,” Ino said, looking between us hesitantly. “If he has a plan, and they’ll stop the fight if it goes wrong…?” She glanced up at Asuma for confirmation and I was reminded, sharply, that the forest had been Team Ten’s first major combat. Hell, Ino had still been worrying about the damn exams being _fair._ They’d taken c-ranks before, but from what they’d said they’d been routine and low level; they weren’t the right formation for heavy fighting and Asuma was cautious enough to give them an easy introduction to missions.

Not cautious enough to keep them out of the exam to begin with though, even if it was meant to be a safe one because of being held in Konoha. Ino’s faith in Shikamaru was sweet, but if it was meant to give him confidence it didn’t and he didn’t look any less nauseous as he made his way down into the arena. Gaara, true to his deadpan but dramatic nature, appeared in a swirl of sand.

“Forfeit your match, forfeit this match,” Karin said, wrinkling her nose in distaste. “Do you always give up?”

“Don’t accuse someone of giving up if you don’t know what their goal is,” Sakura told her sharply.

I tuned them out. Kakashi was harder to ignore; he didn’t touch my arm, but he did rest a subtly glowing hand against my ribs and my shoulders fell in relief as the cold feeling leeched some of the pain away.

“Cracked,” he confirmed quietly. “Not badly, a medic nin can fix them. I can’t do anything for your arm.”

I glanced down at it briefly, loath to take my eyes off the arena. Hayate had almost finished giving his instructions, and with the jacket and splint over it, I couldn’t actually see what damage Karin had done with her chain. It wasn’t bleeding, and all pieces were still attached, so it was probably fine.

“After the matches,” I dismissed, turning to face forward again. I thought for a second Kakashi was going to protest, but I caught his unhappy nod from the corner of my eye and that was enough for me.

Hayate raised his hand, stepping back to the edge. “Begin!”

Almost before he’d finished speaking Shikamaru had leapt back. He didn’t bother sending out his shadow - Gaara had proved already that he didn’t need to move to control his sand - but he did land high on the arena wall to try and buy himself time, and crouched on his heels with his back against the stone so at least one side of him was protected. His hand was already lifting, ready to forfeit, and Ino leaned out over the railing with wide eyes to watch.

Gaara’s sand closed over his wrist, pulling his hand back down and trapping it against Shikamaru’s hip. “No,” he said, flat and immovable, directing the rest of his sand to tug Shikamaru off the wall. Shikamaru tried to catch what he could in his shadow, but with only one hand to form the yin seal he needed his attempt wasn’t strong enough to do more than slow Gaara down.

“Don’t do it,” I mumbled, stare fixed on Gaara. “I know you’re still confused but c’mon Gaara. Don’t do it.”

He can’t have heard me. Even Naruto’s sharper hearing would’ve struggled to pick me up from that distance, but his eyes flicked to mine all the same. His expression didn’t change, slight frown over the familiar blankness, but I held his gaze and _willed_ him not to do it.

He didn’t pause. There was no hesitation - or at least, none that I could see, but I knew him well enough that I thought I would’ve recognised if he was conflicted. He wasn’t. His mind was already made up, probably had been as soon as he knew who he was facing, and as the strongest genin - probably one of the strongest _ninja_ \- in the arena, no one was going to make him change it.

Without breaking eye contact, he raised his hand, and announced, slowly and clearly: “I forfeit.”

There was a hushed silence round the arena. This wasn’t like my fight with Karin, where I’d gone in injured and taken more damage while I was there. Anyone who’d seen Gaara fight before knew that he vastly outclassed the competition - hell, anyone with _eyes_ could see that Shikamaru wasn’t going to win this, and that his only hope had been to forfeit before he could be attacked and Gaara had stopped him even doing _that_.

So he could yield instead.

And tilt his head at me, uncertainty threatening to shake his confidence when all I did was stare. And - I didn’t know when I became so important. I’d hoped, and he’d saved me back in the forest, and I knew he _could_ be so much more than the emotionless killer he acted, but if you asked me to explain why he listened to me when I didn’t even have anything coherent to say? No. I couldn’t. Best I could come up with was that he’d already wanted to change and I was just an excuse. But - but he’d spared Shikamaru, once in the forest and again here, and he was still waiting for me to tell him he did the right thing even as he set Shikamaru down on the floor and let him go, and I -

I grinned at him. Sagged forward in relief and practically _laughed_ with giddiness. “I told you,” I said. “I told you he was good. _Yes_ Gaara. You beautiful summer child, I’m so proud of you.”

He straightened his head, and he didn’t smile but his expression settled into something that was _definitely_ a contented satisfaction, even if it looked like his usual blank frown to someone who didn’t know him. But I did. I did, and I was right, and he was _good._

“In what universe did you ever think you were the quiet one,” Karin asked. “Your emotions give me whiplash. Are all Uchiha like you?”

“Uchiha don't give people whiplash,” I told her distractedly. “We’re notoriously reserved and straight faced.” Then, moving straight past her frankly insulting disbelief, I turned to Naruto and Sakura, still high on the joy of Gaara not killing Shikamaru. “You get it now," I said. "He - you saw what he did, right?”

“We saw,” Sakura assured me, though she didn’t look quite as enthused as I was. That was ok; she’d not properly met Gaara yet. She didn’t know he was a friend.

“Yeah, saw the way he kept staring at you,” Naruto added, and from his expression he was a touch beyond _not enthused_ and verging on protective anger again. I rolled my eyes at him.

“Stop that,” I said. “You could be wary of him when you thought he was a threat, but now you know he’s not. Play nice.”

Behind us, I could feel Kakashi holding himself in that particular i’m-not-tense-you’re-tense pose that said there was something he desperately wanted to say but was holding himself back from. Sakura and Naruto, on the other hand, had no such restraint.

“He killed four people at the tower,” Sakura said, frowning. “He didn’t even need to, he just did. The fact that he’s latched onto you for whatever reason makes him more of a threat, not less.”

“Maybe I’m helping him,” I retorted. “I didn’t tell him _not_ to kill those people by the tower.” I think I’d explicitly told him he could do what he wanted in that regards, so long as he left the people I liked alone. “And he backed off Chouji when I asked. And Shikamaru. He backed off Shikamaru twice. And saved my life. From where I’m standing, he’s golden.”

Kakashi’s pose adjusted to I’m-very-definitely-not-tense-but-if-I-was-I’d-be- _vibrating_ , and I set my jaw and stuck to what I said. The ins and outs would take too long to explain. Besides, explanations weren’t my thing, Sakura could fill him in.

“Uzumaki broke your arm and you invited her up to join us,” Shikamaru said, slouching his way back into the group. “Your judgement of _golden_ is iffy.”

Iffy. _Iffy._ You know what? I was going to ignore that word choice. Be mature. Focus on the bigger picture. “Karin’s family. She’s fine. And she’s not breaking anyone’s arm _now_. Besides, look. You’re alive! It’s a miracle.”

“I - wait, I broke your arm?”

The look Shikamaru levelled at me said exactly how little he appreciated my miracle. He hadn’t quite stopped looking sick, and I wondered if it hadn’t yet sunk in that the match was over. Although, actually, being trapped in sand again only a couple of days after nearly dying to it probably wasn’t the best thing that ever happened to him, and I should maybe be a bit more understanding of his bad mood. I tried to rein myself into a more appropriate level of positivity, and kicked out at his shin as he went past.

“I’m glad you’re still alive,” I told him sincerely. “If he’d actually killed you I promise I’d be pissed at him.”

He snorted. “I’m glad my death would be avenged with a strict telling off,” he drawled in response, then shook his head. “Sometimes I regret giving you a second chance. You’re troublesome.”

I blinked. “A second chance? What did I do with the first one?”

That got me a stink eye, and honestly, I didn’t think I deserved it. I was a delight. Most of the time. Gaara liked me.

“The final match: Hyuuga Neji versus Haruno Sakura!”

Putting aside my many charming qualities, I gave Sakura a supportive nod and elbowed Karin out the way so Chouji had an unobstructed view of the arena. He was looking… not great, but better now that Shikamaru was sat next to him. I cast a quick eye over his bag of chips, but it’d been replaced by a can of corn soup - which he’d dutifully opened and was working way through, so at least he was still eating, even if I detected Ino’s hand in the choice of what exactly that eating was.

Speaking of Ino, she seemed decidedly shaken after Shikamaru’s match. I guess… she assumed he’d have a plan? We already knew from pitting him against Sakura that he preferred having time to work things out rather than being forced to come up with something on the spot. Maybe she chalked the disaster in the forest up to them being taken by surprise - I hadn’t actually asked what had happened before we’d arrived, I’d been too focussed on the aftermath - but seeing Shikamaru genuinely scared even after he’d had time to think of possible counters…

Or maybe I was projecting. Ino was a lot more Sakura’s friend than mine, and I didn’t understand how she thought at the best of times. Sakura, though, I did understand, and I could see from her expression as she joined Neji in the arena that she was cycling through and discarding ideas as she rapidly assessed her opponent.

Calm. Confident, almost arrogantly so. Long hair not tied up; strong enough or fast enough that he wasn’t worried about enemies grabbing it. Bandages but no signs of injury; either a close combat fighter who got hurt and needed to carry more bandages than would fit in his weapon pouch, or a taijutsu user relying on their compression to prevent stress fractures. Hyuuga taijutsu was precise and notoriously delicate. It was in the name. For Neji to be taking precautions against stress fractures despite that said a lot for how aggressively he used his gentle fist.

At least, it did to me, but I had the benefit of foreknowledge. Sakura didn’t. She was just smart. Stupidly smart. On paper she was a taijutsu specialist going up against someone who absolutely dominated close combat and was fairly doomed to lose from the start - which, unacceptable, if I ever found out who rigged these damn matches they were going _down_ for this - but on the other hand, close combat was Sakura’s _jam_. I had faith. She needed to fix Konoha, therefore she needed to be chunin, therefore she needed to win. Simple.

Hayate stepped back, announcing the beginning of the match. For a moment Neji and Sakura just stared at each other, then he raised an eyebrow (yes, I had the sharingan back on, it’d activated at some point when I was trying to read Gaara’s mental state and I hadn’t bothered to turn it off) and asked, “Haruno. Clanless?”

Sakura’s expression hardened. “Civilian.”

Neji nodded, as if she’d confirmed his suspicion. “This match is already over. You lost when you were paired against me, there is no point fighting what is inevitable.”

“Indulge me,” she said, with far more restraint than I personally thought Neji warranted, and shifted forward into a taijutsu stance. Her first few attacks were wary, gauging Neji’s speed and perception. I recognised in them a lot of the tactics she used on me - I was fast, with my kawarimi I was unpredictable, and if I had the sharingan on I was very difficult to surprise with anything but the most well-hidden feints. It was logical for her to try the same tactics, though even her subtlest attempts at hiding didn’t work on Neji, for obvious reasons; he couldn’t predict her as well as I could, but she couldn’t hide from him and after the first couple of passes she stopped trying.

Tricky, given that one of her favourite moves was to spring out of the ground and one-shot people.

On the other hand, his counters and blocks followed clearly defined patterns, and by engaging Sakura each time instead of dodging away he was giving her ample time to learn the steps. _Suspiciously_ ample time, and Sakura backed off with a scowl.

“You’re not taking this seriously.”

“You asked me to indulge you,” he pointed out. “I’m demonstrating the ways in which we are different. With my eyes, I can see everything; you can attack me a thousand times but no matter how many times you do, you cannot beat my defence.”

Sakura’s reply was too quiet, and it dropped beneath the amplifier jutsu. I made a sound of frustration and leaned forward to try and see better - Neji was facing me, and though I wasn’t a lip reader it made it a lot easier to hear him. With Sakura facing away I was relying entirely on my ears, and unfortunately they weren’t red with tomoe to help me out.

“She won’t know till she tries,” Naruto filled in for me. “I don’t like this guy.”

“No one likes this guy. I’m pretty sure this guy doesn’t like this guy. Yet. You should tell him people make their own fate, then he’d realise he’s wrong and stop being such a downer.”

Naruto went to reply, but I flapped a hand to shush him because Neji was speaking again. “ _Trying_ changes nothing. Your life is determined from birth, and your destiny is fixed. Hard work is meaningless against the abilities and talents you are born with, and you -”

Sakura went in hard and fast, fist out for a throat punch that would crush his windpipe if it connected. He raised his left arm in a sweeping block that pushed her aside and let her momentum carry her forward over his shoulder, allowing him to bring his right hand in an open-palmed jyuken strike aimed at her unguarded chest. I saw Sakura’s muscles flex the second before his hand would have reached her and, with her forearm now level with the side of his neck, her chainsaw blades sprung out. He twisted immediately into a deflective spin that sent her flying back; she landed in a defensive crouch, flicking her chainsaw blades back in and slamming her fist into the ground in the same movement. The earth didn’t break, but the cracks and vibrations seemed to disrupt Neji enough for her to risk a second attack, sweeping low and trying to get his feet while staying out of range of his hands.

It didn’t work - either Neji had been bluffing about his defense being disrupted, or he was quick enough to recover it - and when Sakura retreated again, she was favouring her left knee.

“I’ve sealed the tenketsu point,” he said, coming to a halt so abruptly that his hair kept swinging round for a second afterwards. He looked as flat and unruffled as he had before, not even acknowledging that Sakura’d been a split second away from outright decapitating him. Either he was an idiot or his control of his emotionless mask was just that good, because I knew firsthand that having Sakura’s chainsaws that close to your head was an _extremely_ ruffling experience.

“Give up,” he continued. “You tried. You failed. You were always going to fail. Go home and accept your place in life; you’ll only hurt yourself more if you don’t.”

“I _really_ don’t like this guy,” Naruto complained. “Giving up’s wrong. No wonder he thinks destiny controls everything if he gives up all the time.”

I hummed. Yes, on the whole, Neji’s worldview needed correcting, but he wasn’t _completely_ wrong. Being born with a byakugan was a hell of an advantage compared to everything Sakura had had to fight against to get where she was. But, given that Naruto’s own ‘destiny’ so far had been orphaned, neglected, and hated for things he couldn’t control, he probably already knew that. “Giving up’s not always bad. Shikamaru wasn’t wrong to try and forfeit. Sometimes there are fights you can’t win.” If I was into not giving up, I’d call Danzo out and save all the kids in ROOT. Get justice for my family. Bring Itachi home and make people acknowledge him for who he was, not for what he was forced to do.

Stay with Naruto to watch his back while he proved that he wasn’t the demon people saw him as. Stay with Sakura to help her sort out the clan-civilian divide and fix Konoha with her like I promised. Stay with the fish. I owed them a rock garden.

I scowled. I wasn’t staying. Don’t be _ridiculous_. It’s your own fault for getting attached to people, or did you fucking _forget_ the plan to run away and let Itachi protect you? I wasn’t in the academy any more. I didn’t have that veneer of protection, the vague safety net that came with being the rookie of the year and knowing that canon Sasuke had been fine up until Itachi arrived. He hadn’t been, anyway. I wasn’t either. And - they didn’t matter. The promises, the way Naruto had asked me to not leave him behind, the way they’d both been fucking _torn apart_ when they thought Orochimaru killed me. Kakashi sending the dogs, Sasuke-chan, fucking _Chouji_ \- none of it _mattered_. If I had a fate, it was shit, and _giving up_ and getting the hell out of dodge was my way of defying it and if it hurt, then _fuck it._

Fuck it.

Why did they have to love me.

Why did it have to matter.

God, get over yourself. Look at you, swinging wildly into depression for no reason, overreacting to a perfectly innocent comment and making it all about you when it wasn’t. Cycling back to the same tired argument, nothing had changed. Let it go. Not everything that happens is the end of the world. Just. Have nice things. Let your damn friends care for you. And then. Leave them behind. It’s fine.

How come Ino never brought me a can of corn soup, huh. We’d been watching the preliminaries all day, and the only food in the tower was made of misery and blandness. They got the blandest flavours in the world, condensed them down to their core essence, and evaporated that into _essence d’bland._ Blandeaux. Eau de blandume. Here’s dinner, bland appetit. Itablandimasu, we took every speck of joy out of this food just for you because we suck. Behold: rice, but each grain is a representation of a parallel universe where nothing happens and the entirety of space-time is taken up by _bland_.

Sakura had just used the hiding in earth technique to get under Neji’s position and shatter the floor from below, swiping at him through the one part his heavenly spin defense couldn’t cover - the soles of his feet. He had to have seen her coming, but the combination of her punching the literal ground out from under him and the unexpected extra reach her knuckle spikes gave her were enough for her to land a blow. He moved with the momentum, jumping up into the air and pushing off from her fist for extra height but from the miniscule way he faltered when he landed I was _pretty_ certain that her spikes had gone through the soles of his sandals and into his feet - which left us at a waiting game, because Sakura’s spikes were poison coated, but it took at least a minute for the paralysis to take full effect.

When this was over, I was going to find a way to mix her a better one. A minute was _way_ too long in combat. Traditional paralysis poisons could be fast acting and weak or slow acting and strong, but these were ridiculous limitations. She needed fast acting and strong, and if I didn’t have a plant in my garden that could do it then I’d bug Ino until she gave me one from the Yamanaka greenhouses instead.

Sakura hung back, still badly favouring her knee, and tried to buy time for the paralysis to work.

“Fate’s an excuse,” she accused. “People who succeed say they worked for it, but people who fail blame it on fate. You can’t have it both ways.”

“No one succeeds without fate,” Neji returned. “Every clan head is born to it, every Hokage is chosen from a small group of shinobi. Each person is powerless to change their destiny and the only thing we have in common is that all our fates ultimately end in death.”

“Do I look _powerless_ to you?” Sakura spat. Two thirds of a minute left for the poison. Depending how deep her knuckle spikes had gone, Neji should start to notice his movements slowing soon. “The Hokage is chosen by people. People make fate. If people’s futures are determined by how they were born then it’s because _people_ allow them to be and the only thing stopping it from changing is the same people refusing to try.”

“Refusing to _try,_ ” Neji snarled, his calm fracturing. One hand twitched up to his forehead, but he didn’t remove his headband. “If you really aren’t powerless then perhaps you were fated not to be, but _some of us_ -”

Sakura charged. I gripped the railing, leaning forwards - there were at least fifteen seconds left before the paralysis took effect, what was she _doing_ losing her temper. Chakra gathered around Neji’s hands in a visible haze of blue and he swiped out at her as soon as she got close. With the way her weight was shifted to keep it off her knee as much as possible she couldn’t hope to dodge but she didn’t even try, just tilted to take the jyuken strike on her torso instead of her shoulder and ploughed the full force of her charge through her fist and into Neji’s sternum.

His heavenly spin was a fraction too slow. It flung Sakura away and she landed, hand to her chest and ribs heaving painfully for breath around the closed tenketsu, but when Neji stumbled out of it there was blood on the front of his jacket.

“You’ve lost,” Sakura panted, no sign of her earlier anger. “I wasn’t sure I’d got you, but that proves it. You’re already being affected by the paralysis. If you want to forfeit under your own power, do it now.”

“ _I’ve_ lost?” Neji repeated. “I closed the tenketsu over your heart. You can’t chanel chakra, and if it doesn’t reopen soon the damage will cause your internal organs to fail. You can’t beat the gentle fist with strength.”

Why the fuck not. She beat demonic ice mirrors with strength. I’d say don’t knock it till you’ve been flattened by it, but Neji just took a full shannaro to the ribcage. And, from her expression, Sakura knew it; she looked grimly determined in a way that made me wonder if her previous anger had been faked to draw Neji out long enough for the paralysis to start working.

“I’m not beating the gentle fist,” she said. “I’m beating you.” With one hand still over her chest and her shoulders still hunched forward, she pulled a kunai from her pouch. When she walked towards him she didn’t even try to hide the way she was limping, but the implication was clear: no chakra, no taijutsu, no problem. With Neji trapped by her poison and unable to move, the kunai would be all she needed.

He hesitated, and I saw clear indecision flick over his face, though I doubted anyone else would have spotted it. Or the way his muscles flexed, subtly testing how much movement he still had; from the outside he was just standing there and watching Sakura slowly approach, but inside his head I could see his thoughts racing. Would the sixty four trigrams be enough? Even if he was moving slow, did he have control left for another gentle fist? Would it make a difference?

He raised a hand. I tensed, and only realised when I tasted blood that I’d been biting my lip, but Sakura kept moving. He paused, hand hovering in a fighting stance - then raised it further.

“I yield,” he announced. Sakura stopped, barely a metre away, and nodded at him in acceptance. “Maybe I was wrong about you being fated to be nothing,” he continued, head tilted quizzically to the side as he looked at her.

She snorted at that, pocketing the kunai and stepping up to support him when the poison made him start to sway. “I’m civilian,” she said. “No one cares about us enough to give us a fate. We just get on with it.”

“Ah,” he managed, though whatever else he may have said was lost as he slumped against her. Gai appeared beside them a second later to take him, but Sakura made eye contact with Kakashi and subtly shook her head. When Hayate announced her the winner, she limped out the arena under her own power.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Lee.exe has stopped working, please check circuitry for tears and excess buildup of youth


	29. Chapter 29

“Your _heart_ ,” I repeated, once everything had settled and Naruto and I were finally allowed in to see Sakura in the hospital. “Of which you have _one._ You need your heart! The fuck were you - _don’t move_ \- thinking, going all ‘cool guys don’t look at explosions’ and walking away like that when Hyuuga _literally just warned you_ about the fact that your heart was going to stop.”

“Sasuke-chan, I’m fine,” Sakura said, and I made an inarticulate sound of frustration and disbelief as I handed her the glass of water she’d been reaching for. “I’m _fine_ ,” she repeated. “He said damage, not stop, and the medic nins confirmed I’m all good.”

“Fine is shit,” I retorted. “Are you seriously trying to pull an _I’m fine_ on _me_ of all people. He said your internal organs would fail, if you’re opening your mouth to call me a hypocrite I will take that glass back and pour it over your head, how sure are we that the medics know what they’re talking about anyway because if you ask me they left _suspiciously_ quickly after they healed you. You’re not fine. Fine is cancelled. Fucking - Naruto, I need another arm.”

I tugged ineffectively at the pillow I was trying to straighten for her; with my one hand, I was achieving a lopsided sag that if anything made the situation worse. Sakura huffed, pretending to be annoyed at my fussing - not that I was fussing - but she leaned forward obligingly so Naruto and I could reposition her pillows and did very little to hide her amusement.

“They had to heal the others,” she said patiently. “Lots of people got hurt in the exam, not just me.” Her gaze lingered, briefly, on the cut and black eye Orochimaru had given me in the forest. I flicked my own gaze away. I hadn’t let anyone treat it. I couldn’t; the fact that Orochimaru didn’t know I had the sharingan was the only protection I had. That and, apparently, Gaara, but I couldn’t expect him to swoop in and rescue me another time.

I still didn’t know if I believed that Orochimaru didn’t know. I’d gone over everything. If he _did_ know I had the sharingan, why hadn’t he given me the curse seal? Not that I wasn’t relieved he hadn’t, but.

But even if he thought I didn’t have it, why hold back? It didn’t cost him anything to seal me. If I didn’t magically awaken the sharingan later, he could just discard me as a failed experiment. So. Why wait? What was he doing? Had I really just been lucky and he hadn’t had time? Did he have other plans, were there things I was meant to be being afraid of that I didn’t yet _know_ I had to be afraid of?

“The bastard’s right though,” Naruto said, breaking into my thoughts as he came round and inspected the crumpled mess I was making of the pillowcase. It put him too close, and when I startled and hurriedly let go of it to step back I accidentally knocked into him with my shoulder. From the way he steadied me though he’d been expecting it, and I took a breath and tried to force my stupidly recurring panic down where it wouldn’t be so obvious. “Fine usually doesn’t mean fine,” he continued, straightening but not moving away. It… helped, actually. It helped. “Are you sure you’re ok?”

“It aches a bit,” Sakura admitted. “No more than if I punch something too hard, just in different muscles. They said it’d go away by tomorrow morning. Other than that, yes, I’m sure.” She smiled at us to soften the words, and I felt another bit of tension bleed out of me. Aches weren’t so bad. She was fine, in the genuine way of being fine, Orochimaru hadn’t given me the curse seal, and my eyes were successfully kept secret to see another day. The second exam had been long, and painful, and I was still down an arm until Jiraiya got his ass in gear and reached the village to fix it, but it was over. We survived. We were _good._

Well. Not really. But god, I was exhausted, and Naruto wasn’t moving away despite the fact that I was more leaning back against him than standing up myself at this stage, and if surviving wasn’t enough to be good then I’d make it be.

“We’ll break you out at dawn,” I promised her. “You and Chouji. It’ll be great.”

“You won’t,” Shikamaru said, sloping into the room with Chouji’s arm over his shoulders to help him walk. Ino had his other side, and between them they manoeuvered him to the neighbouring bed. “Chouji’s here for at least another week, no one’s breaking him out anywhere.”

“Sorry,” Chouji added, looking drained and several inches thinner than normal. I leant forward in alarm, but he just smiled tiredly and shook his head so I assumed that whatever had made him burn through his chakra enough to impact him like that was at least intentional.

“Don’t be,” Ino said firmly. “Listen to your medics, they know what they’re talking about. Speaking of which,” she turned to me with a frown, “How come no one’s healed you?”

I shifted uncomfortably. Nothing could be done for my arm - it was splinted and bandaged as well as it could be, but with it being completely void of chakra a med-nin may as well be trying to heal a broken training post. They’d need to keep a permanent supply of their own chakra running through it, not just for the time it took to perform any jutsu but for the hours after for the natural healing that my chakra _would_ have done to make sure none of the bones fused wrong. As it was, my best bet was to leave it be and wait for Jiraiya to take the seal off, hopefully tomorrow or the day after at the latest.

As for my ribs and my eye… If I asked someone to heal my cracked ribs but _not_ look at my eye, that would basically be admitting that I had something to hide. A few fractures weren’t that bad. The black eye would heal fine, the cut underneath it would scar, but. What can you do.

“Sasuke-chan doesn’t like hospitals,” Sakura said diplomatically, filling in the awkward pause when I took too long to answer. I snorted, because neither did anyone with sense, that was a rubbish excuse.

“Sasuke-chan has secrets and doesn’t trust med-nins as far as she can throw them,” I elaborated. “Wait. As far as she can throw them without chakra.” Wow, that saying didn’t translate well.

“She… what?” Chouji asked, staring at me in confusion. I shrugged, suddenly aware I may have misstepped; everyone had secrets, but not trusting the hospital was one step from not trusting the village, and that wasn’t the sort of attitude Konoha encouraged. And med-nins had probably just saved his life, even if he’d seemed stable before, so it probably wasn’t particularly sensitive of me to be shitting all over them. Sakura’s life too. In fact, they probably saved a lot of lives, and Ino wanted to be one, and really, if you couldn’t trust your doctor then who could you trust, but. Kabuto. Danzo. God knew who else. I trusted my team, my brother, the dogs, and I was pretty sure Team Ten had worked out by now that I had my sharingan, and that was it.

“I don’t like people I don’t know,” I defended. “It’s a personality trait. They’re probably fine. I can throw people pretty far.”

“She,” Shikamaru repeated. I blinked, and he pressed, “Sasuke-chan. She.”

I wrinkled my nose. “Since when -” My brain caught up to my ears and I slammed to a halt, face closing off. “Slip of the tongue,” I said, too flatly, then backpedaled into a much more casual expression and shrugged as I tried to play it off. “Kun sounds weird. Sa _suke-kun?_ Too many k’s. Awkward. You don’t need to make a big deal of it.”

He didn’t either; chan wasn’t reserved for girls, it was just more common. The _she_ was harder to handwave away, but I was working on the principle of being supremely confident and therefore unquestionable and I had faith that it would see me through. That or I could blame it on the drugs. We were in a hospital, there were bound to be drugs somewhere. Good painkillers were trippy trippy things, you could hear anything on them and never know the truth.

“We’re not,” Sakura promised, shooting Shikamaru a warning frown. Then she turned back to me and paused before adding, “Not that it would be a big deal, if someone was a she. Or a he. Or anything, if they wanted to be.”

The last bit was aimed as much to the room as to me with that same edge of warning, and I cut across before she could say anything else. "I know. No, I know. They're just pronouns, they're stupid, they don't mean anything. Not -” I shook my head in frustration. So much for the unquestionable supreme confidence plan. “They do, I mean it’s a big thing for some people, but also gender doesn’t matter, so. But I’m fine. It doesn’t bother me. Apply to me. I’m fine.”

I bit my lip, hard, to stop any more babble coming out. I wanted a high place to perch on but the room was depressingly lacking, so I made do with crossing my good arm over the sling in front of myself and trying to burrow further back into Naruto as though that wouldn’t be blatantly obvious. I _was_ fine, I’d acknowledged that I was a girl ages back and that was fine, being called Sasuke-chan was fine - I was good. It was all good.

I mean, no, it wasn’t. But it should be. Like Sakura said, it wasn't a big deal; there was no _reason_ for it not to be, but by that logic there was no reason to still pretend to be a boy. I didn't even know why I _did_ still pretend, except that the thought of being honest made me want to retreat back into my boy-shell and hiss at the world until it went away which was literally the stupidest reaction given how much I hated the damn boy body so _why -_

Naruto shifted, moving his arm out the way so the fingers I’d worked behind my sling could reach his jacket and hook on. I blinked, unclenching my jaw, and resisted the urge to rub my eyes and whine about not wanting to deal with any of this. Not that that was really an option given how I apparently lacked a brain to mouth filter and couldn't keep my own pronouns straight when I spoke, but. You know. Dealing was hard.

And whining was pathetic, so tough shit. You’re a girl. You know it. Sakura knows it. The whole fucking room probably knows it after this conversation. So. For once, stop being dramatic about everything, and be _competent._

I went to open my mouth and confirm it with some kind of throwaway line and act like it wasn’t important, but I hesitated.

It was just. Uchiha Sasuke was a boy. I wasn’t, but he was, and on some level, some part of me still struggled to give that up. Uchiha Sasuke was a boy, with fire and lightning jutsu, he grew up to be one of the most powerful ninja on the continent, and Itachi killed the clan for him. And. And that was a big thing to lose. But if I kept hold of it, at least a bit of it, that part of me argued, then I wouldn't. I could keep it. Keep him. Still be him.

Cheap knockoff version that didn't work as well, but still him.

It wasn't that I thought Itachi wouldn't love me anymore if I was a girl. That wasn't anything to do with it, Itachi wasn't that shallow. Nor was I worried that Naruto or Sakura would reject me, not when Sakura had made it so clear that they wouldn't. So. So what actually woud I lose? If you broke it down, what was the point of holding on? I didn't get any benefit out of being a boy, it didn't stop me screwing anything up or failing all the time. Hell, it didn't help me achieve anything _else_ on the list of things Uchiha Sasuke was - no fire, no lightning, not as strong as him couldn't use ninjutsu like him couldn't live alone in my own damn _house_ like him, in every way imaginable when you compared me against the boy I was meant to be I came up short. Came up - I wasn't even as tall as he was, for fuck's sake.

I wasn't him. Everyone thought I was, but I wasn't. All these things he did that I couldn't, I was the only person who knew about them.

Which was a good thing. It was a _good_ thing. He and I lived through the same shit and I fell apart while he got stronger, but they didn't know that. They couldn't see that I was meant to be doing so much better than I was, because they had nothing to compare me to. They couldn't see that I was meant to be a _boy_ because they didn't have him to compare me to, and if I let go of that, if I let go of _him_ then. Then I'd have nothing to compare me to either. I wouldn't be a failed someone else. I'd just be. Me.

Shouldn't... Shouldn't that be a good thing?

“Bastard?” Naruto asked quietly, and I made an unhappy sound and tried, ineffectively, to hunch further into his chest. I recognised the tone of voice; he was trying to work out if he should deflect and move the conversation on or not. I didn't know. If the conversation moved on, I'd lose this chance to be a girl. I didn't think it was the sort of thing I could bring up by myself. If the conversation didn't move on, I'd lose the pretence of being someone I wasn't, except I wouldn't even lose that because I was the only one who knew.

God, why did it _matter._ I was the same person whether I was meant to be someone else or not. A gender was a stupid thing to hold onto when it wasn't yours. _Gender_ was stupid. The differences between me and the boy I wasn't were far more than just pronouns, so who cared which ones I used? My mum was dead. My brother would love me no matter what. I was the only version of me my team knew, and I was a shit actor. I could hardly claim to have misled them with the way I flailed through life leapfrogging into panic attacks, there was no _way_ they didn't know the me that I was instead of the me I could have been if I was someone else.

There was no way. Even when I tried, I fell short. I could hold onto his gender all I liked, but I couldn't be someone else.

I... couldn't be someone else.

Itachi killed the clan for someone else.

No, that's not true. He didn't; I was still me back then, just a me with the potential to become someone I now wasn't. That's all. My mum was dead but she was still _my_ mum, the person I didn't measure up against was the older Uchiha Sasuke, not the little kid we'd both started as. The avenger one. The one that wanted to kill Itachi, because he was an idiot and couldn't see how much Itachi loved us. The one that didn't care about Sakura, the one that put his fist through Naruto's chest - why the fuck was I trying so hard to be anything like that guy? I hated him. I _hated_ him, suddenly and fiercely with a burst of resentment I couldn't fully explain, Itachi was my brother and he loved me and he wouldn't just _stop_ loving me because I wasn't the brother he thought I was. Love didn't work like that. It _didn't._ That wasn't - I was me, my gender was such a tiny, insignificant part of that, how dare I - how dare _anyone_ \- think that that would be enough to invalidate everything my brother had done for me? Sakura and Naruto wouldn't care, he wouldn't care, _I_ didn't care, and if Uchiha Sasuke was a big thing to lose, well, so was a tumour but that didn't mean you had to hang onto it.

“I’m a girl,” I told the floor, blurting it out in an almost combative snarl. The anger left in a sudden rush and took my conviction with it, and without it my mind blanked on what to say. I floundered, then flicked my eyes up to Sakura and shrugged helplessly. “I’m Sasuke, and I’m a girl," I repeated, quieter. "Nice to meet you.”

Her face broke into a grin. “Ok,” she said. “Sasuke-chan. Nice to meet you too.”

“‘Nice to meet you’,” Naruto repeated, and I could hear the frown. He went to put an arm over my shoulder then reconsidered when he remembered the sling and settled for shifting me more firmly in front of him so he could rest his chin on my head instead. “We met you ages ago, bastard. Wait, does bastard work for girls?”

“Girls are bitch,” Shikamaru suggested helpfully, and for a moment I was too thrown by the lack of earth shattering revelations happening to respond. I’d just had a damn _moment_ , the fuck did everyone get off being so accepting of it. I know I said it wasn’t a big deal earlier but I also lied, this was the biggest deal and someone should acknowledge that.

“You’re a bitch,” I shot back. “Bitches aren’t constrained by gender. Neither are bastards.” I eyed him warily, but he didn’t say anything else, and if he had any further thoughts he kept them to himself.

“You shouldn’t call a girl either,” Ino cut in. “They’re rude. Chouji, why are you confused.”

I blinked, following her gaze to where Chouji was raising his hands disarmingly. “I’m not,” he protested. “I just don’t get why Sasuke’s parents would say she was a boy if she wasn’t.”

“Um.” I shook my head, putting my big deal moment aside and trying to keep up with the conversation. “They didn’t know?” I tried, and Chouji’s expression turned to complete bafflement.

“Girl mind,” Ino supplied. “Boy body, girl mind. Sometimes people don’t match. Or their mind changes or isn’t either to begin with. Bodies aren’t important, loads of people are different in their head to how they look from the outside.” She said it casually, as though it were a given fact that everyone knew. Though, considering her family jutsu, maybe it was; she’d presumably know better than most.

“Bodies are important though,” Chouji argued, though he darted an unsure look at me as if checking it was ok. “If Sasuke’s a girl then she should have a girl body. Right? Otherwise she’ll feel...” He trailed off, clearly struggling for the words to explain what he meant.

“She doesn’t _need_ one,” Ino insisted. “Minds matter. Girl mind makes her a girl.”

“But. Minds are part of bodies?” He squinted at Ino, then caught himself and turned to me instead. “Sorry,” he said. “I don’t mean you can’t be a girl. If you say you are I believe you.” He looked genuinely sincere about it as well, and I found myself relaxing in response.

“I know,” I assured him. In a way, I was glad he was struggling with it. It made me feel more settled about the fact that _I_ was struggling with it, and it was always easier to focus on someone else than on me. “And you’re right, a girl body would help, but this is the one I’ve got.” It wasn’t the best, but it was mine. It, the life that came with it, the people around it - no one else's. Mine. I took a breath, fixing that fact in my mind until it stuck and making Naruto grumble as he lifted his chin and moved it to a better position. “Boy body,” I summarised, “but inside it’s just me.”

“And just you is a girl,” Chouji said, nodding. “Ok. Do you want us to call you Sasuke-chan too?”

I shook my head, still somewhat bemused by how easily everyone was taking it. “Sasuke’s fine.”

“Hime,” Naruto complained as he was dislodged again. “Stop. You were comfy.”

“You know I know you’re not actually being rude when you call me bastard? Also you know I’m actually bending down to let you do that, I’m not that short.”

“Sorry Sasuke-chan,” Sakura said. “You kind of are.”

I huffed at her in betrayal and straightened to my full height. Naruto, the fucker, straightened with me and put his chin firmly back on top of my head. It wasn’t the easiest angle for him anymore but it was still definitely doable and I craned my neck back to scowl up at him.

“Comfy,” he blatantly lied, and I let go of his jacket to elbow him in the ribs.

It wasn’t that easy. It’s never that easy. There was a big difference between saying something because the moment called for it and saying something because you'd thought it through and meant it. Not that I didn't mean it - I did; I was a girl, and at the end of what was possibly the longest week I'd ever lived through, I could finally be _seen_ as a girl as well, and that was. That was great. It was a relief, it was amazing, it was terrifying in a way I wasn't going to look at just then, and I oscillated between wanting it to be something huge and important and wanting it to be done with and inconsequential enough times that I gave up and deliberately shoved it aside and refused to look at it. Other things were going on in the world. Bigger things.

Did Sakura realise, I wondered, what she was doing in helping me avoid medical care? I knew I didn’t trust the hospital. I knew I didn’t trust the _village_ , or buy into any of the will of fire crap we’d been fed at the academy, but I’d always thought I was alone in that. Except, was I? Shikamaru’s comments from the tower, how being a ninja meant that life wasn’t fair then we died. The way Kakashi ranked the team as more important than the rules, the way Sakura was implicitly agreeing that the hospital weren’t trustworthy enough by helping me keep my sharingan hidden. There was a disconnect forming between the image in my head of Konoha’s citizens being mindlessly, unquestioningly obedient to Konoha’s orders and the reality of the people I knew, and it was something I should probably get to grips with at some point, but. Not tonight.

I spent the evening at Naruto’s. His apartment was much closer to the centre of the village, easier to guard and harder for an enemy to sneak up on, and Kakashi left us with three dogs and strict instructions to run and not engage if Orochimaru made another appearance.

“What kind of idiots does he take us for,” I muttered, frowning unhappily at Pakkun and curling myself further into the corner of Naruto’s sofa. “I didn’t _intentionally_ engage him last time.”

“Not everything’s about you, pup,” Pakkun said. He didn’t elaborate, but he did tilt his head over to the kitchenette where Naruto was waiting the required three minutes for the cup ramen to make, and I paused.

“Naruto,” I said, giving up any attempt at subtlety. We were being quiet but he had ridiculously sharp hearing. He’d probably already been listening. “Kakashi thinks you need to be told not to attack a sannin.”

“If the sannin doesn’t try to take your eyes again then I won’t,” he promised. “If attacking is the most sensible option at the time then I will.”

I stared. Pakkun shrugged, and hopped down off the cushion to join Bull and Urushi on the floor. There wasn’t the most space - Urushi was under the low living room table, Bull had wedged himself across the front of the sofa so that Naruto had to climb over the side to take his seat - but given that I usually lived in one room and the adjoining bathroom, the apartment felt cosily spacious to me.

“Don’t attack sannins,” I said. He handed me a ramen and didn’t answer, so I tried again. “ _Naruto._ He wasn’t phased by Gaara. You can’t fight him. He’s a fucking kage, you’ll _die_.”

“I’ll be sensible,” he repeated, with a certainty that did absolutely nothing to reassure me. “ANBU headquarters are really close. They’d be here in less than a minute, and with clones I can stay out of range.”

“Or I could grab you and forcibly kawarimi _both_ of us to the ANBU headquarters and _they_ can deal with him.” I made to run an agitated hand through my hair then realised I was holding dinner and aborted. “How are you allowed to have serious conversations with me about putting myself in danger then just turn around and casually, casually - _this._ ” Did he think he was less breakable because he had the kyuubi? Did he not _appreciate_ how much of a different level Orochimaru was playing at?

“I’m not -”

“You _are_. What the fuck, Naruto. I’m a big girl, I don’t need _babying._ ” I pushed aside both the odd rush that came with calling myself a girl out loud and the insistent thought that said I did, didn’t I, that was the whole point of the Itachi plan in the first place. That was different. I needed Itachi because the people after my eyes were ridiculously overpowered. It wasn’t childish to need help fighting them, it was common sense.

“I’m not babying you,” he said stubbornly. “I’m just saying that if he tries to take your eyes, and if it makes sense to fight him to buy time until ANBU get here, then I’ll fight him.”

“Ok. Fine. If you fight him, I fight him with you.”

“No, that’s -”

“ _Babying_ ,” I accused, jabbing at him with my chin because my hand was occupied with chopsticks. “It’s lopsided. When I try to protect you and Sakura, I’m taking risks and ignoring the fact that people care when I get hurt. Now you’re trying to protect me, and not listening to me saying _I_ care when _you_ get hurt. How is it different?”

“It’s different,” he replied, frustrated, “because you’re -” He cut himself off, biting his lip and looking away.

“Because I’m what?” I pressed. “Because it’s my eyes he’s after? It won’t stop him killing you if you’re in the way. Because what, Naruto?”

He didn’t answer. I tried to run through my head and guess what he was dodging around. Because he didn’t trust my survival instinct? Because I panicked? Because I was a girl? No, not that last one. This wasn’t a new thing; we might not have explicitly talked about it before, but he and Sakura had been edging towards overprotective for a while. The way he was refusing to back down over Orochimaru was almost scarily similar to the way he’d been eager to fight Kabuto, and it sat as wrong in my stomach as that had.

I’d known Kabuto was dangerous. He hadn’t. He’d thought he was facing a genin, and he’d won, but if Kabuto hadn’t had a cover to maintain then would the fight have ended the same way? I knew Orochimaru was dangerous. Naruto didn’t. Not the same way I did; he knew I was afraid, and he’d fought Manda and the two mud clones, but I’d taken Orochimaru himself away before anyone else could get involved.

“Because what?” I asked again, drawing my feet further up the sofa towards me until I had to lift the ramen to make space for my knees against my chest.

He hesitated, glancing down to the dogs before answering, and I raised my chin and waited. Bull and Urushi were two of the quieter ones in the pack, and Pakkun was staying well out of it, but if Naruto wanted to bring them in then Kakashi’s orders were to run and not to engage. I was pretty sure they’d come down on my side.

“You’re not a combat type,” he said finally, looking back to me with his jaw set. “You get hurt more easily than I do, and you don’t have a healing factor.”

Combat wouldn’t work against Orochimaru. That wasn’t the point. “Sakura doesn’t either. You don’t worry about her. Are you saying it’s less important if she gets hurt?”

“What - _no._ ”

“Then what the hell -” I sucked in a sharp breath as I realised. “You think I need protecting,” I said, hunching in on myself. “Not a combat type, you think I can’t fight.”

“I know you can fight,” he said, but he refused to meet my eyes and I shook my head in disbelief.

“Yeah. Sure. Just, not as well as you or Sakura can, I get it.” I didn’t want to look at him, so I looked instead at my ramen cup, balanced on my knees because I only had one hand and it was busy. I hadn’t eaten much, but it was shit anyway, so I dropped the chopsticks in the cup and put it on the floor next to Bull. No wonder Naruto started growing so fast after a month of real food in Wave and another month of real food living with me; if this was all he used to eat before it was a miracle he’d ever got as tall as he had.

Me, I’d been eating real food for years, and apparently it was time I faced up to the fact that I was just a shrimp. Midget. Tiny weak person made for holding onto Naruto’s jacket for comfort and tucking myself under his chin. I’d managed to let go of being a boy, what was another thing to add to the list.

I grit my teeth, and as grateful as I’d been to borrow his clothes earlier because I’d been wearing mine non stop for six days and I’d rather burn them than wear them again, just then I hated the fact that I was curled up on his sofa in his oversized pyjamas with my hair still damp from his shower and my dead arm bandaged in a sling. _I don’t need protecting_ said the idiot with the broken ribs and the cut under her eye that was going to scar because she was too afraid to let the medics heal her.

“Hime -”

“I _get_ it,” I repeated bitterly. “You rescued me from Haku in Wave, Kakashi rescued me from Zabuza. _Haku_ rescued me from drowning before we even got there. Gaara rescued me from Orochimaru. I couldn’t do anything to Kabuto. I saved Shikamaru from Gaara, but Gaara doesn’t count because he’s a good person.” Beat Karin, but that didn’t count either, her team only passed because they were lucky and Gaara left them a scroll. Got the Sound team out in the written exam, except that wasn’t combat, was it? Neither was getting Orochimaru away from the others, but I fucking _had_ Shino until the paralysis bug kicked in. Fake Shino. Mud clone Shino. And I regularly beat Shikamaru, didn’t I, I regularly beat _all_ of Team Ten and they weren’t exactly a heavy hitting team once you took out their combo attacks but they weren’t _nothing_. Neither was Iruka, neither were _Sakura or Naruto_ and fine, spars weren’t quite the same as real life, but I wasn’t _helpless._

“No, fuck that. I don’t get it. The people we fight are _insane._ I make the best of a load of shit, you don’t get to call me not enough because I can’t win.”

“I’m not calling you not enough,” he protested heatedly. “I’m just - how am I wrong for not wanting you to get hurt?”

“We’re _ninja._ ”

“You can’t use one of your _arms._ ”

“That’s not relevant and you know it.” He pulled a disbelieving face at me and I growled and amended, “That’s relevant to _right now_ but it’s not relevant to you not thinking I’m strong enough to fight my own battles.”

“That’s not what I’m saying,” he insisted, and when I just scowled he huffed and sat back, crossing and uncrossing his arms and ending up in a curled up position with his hands hooked round his ankles to keep them still. “That’s not what I mean to say. I know you’re strong. I know you can fight.”

He paused, struggling for words, and I filled in the gaps for him. “You just don’t trust me not to be stupid. You and Sakura. You think I take risks and get into fights too big for me and don’t care if I die.”

“ _Do_ you?”

“Fuck off,” I spat, and pushed myself off the sofa. I forgot Bull was there and nearly stumbled as I redirected my feet not to stand on him, kicking over the ramen in the process.

“Damnit, hime -”

“It’s _bastard_. It’s always been bastard. I’m not a princess, I’m shit and I’m a bastard and I’m not _trying_ to put myself in danger, I’m - go _away_ Naruto.” My voice was shaking, and when he tried to follow me to the window I turned on him and shoved him away with an angry arm of chakra. “Do I _look_ like I’m suicidal? Do I look like I haven’t been trying _really fucking hard_ to stay alive, is the fact that I fucking care about _your_ stupid life so, so fucking unbelievable that the only explanation is that every time I’m minorly inconvenienced I go, fuck it, guess I’ll die then, if I’m such a fucking - fucking _window_ \- such a fucking liability then why the fuck are you bothering, why the fuck won’t this fucking window _open._ ” I slammed my fist against it, hard enough that if it was normal glass it should have shattered, and only succeeded in making my hand sting. “ _Fucking._ Why. The fuck. Leave me _alone_.” I left it there, palm against the cool glass and tilted my head forward until I couldn’t see the reflection of my stupid face with the stupid cut beneath my eye and the stupid everything of stupidness and _fuck._

Just. Fuck. Just fuck. I didn’t even know why I was so mad. If I was mad. This felt dangerously close to crying to be mad, but I was definitely angry at something, so. The world, for sending so many overpowered enemies after me? If I stormed off into the night like I wanted I’d probably get scooped up by Orochimaru and given a whole new seal on my neck to match the one I’d already got on my arm, how was that fair.

I’d _literally_ just decided that Naruto knew me well enough that there wasn't any point hiding who I was from him. Naruto and Sakura. And Chouji and Shikamaru and - everyone. Ok? Konoha was shit, and I hated it, and I’d accidentally started caring about far too many people in it, and that mattered. They mattered. Their opinion matttered. And - and if I didn’t have Itachi to protect me yet then the fact that other people cared enough to do it for him, that was great, right? I should be delighted that Naruto wanted to keep me safe. I should be. I.

Fuck.

“I’m trying really hard,” I told the window miserably. “It’s not my fault that the people we fight are insane.”

“I know,” Naruto said from behind me, sounding as miserable and worn out as I felt. “I’m sorry.”

I huffed out a beat of what could barely be called laughter. “What for? You didn’t want me to get hurt and I blew up at you. I should be sorry.” I paused, then added, “I think I got ramen in your carpet.”

He ignored that. “For… I’m sorry for not trusting you. You’re right. I just assumed that you didn’t care, because… because it was easier.”

“Easier?” I echoed, still not lifting my head.

“If the problem was that you didn’t care about yourself, then I thought I could fix it by making you see that _I_ cared,” he said. “And if you were only in danger because you put yourself there, then I could make you not be in danger. But if you’re trying to survive and you _still_ keep getting hurt, then it means the danger’s so much bigger than that, and. And I don’t know how to protect you from it.”

I stayed where I was for a long moment, all my bitterness against how unfair the universe was balled up in my chest and sticking there, then forcibly swallowed it down. When I pushed off from the glass I noticed that Urushi was sat on the floor at my heels, facing back towards Naruto with his ears tilted to me, angled just enough to put himself between us if he needed to.

It made me want to cry. The bitterness evaporated in an exhausted, defeated slump, and without anger to keep me afloat all that was left was the feeling of being out of my depth and tears stinging at the corners of my eyes. The dogs had stayed out of the whole argument. Urushi was one of the quietest of the pack, and even when he’d been left to supervise our d-ranks he’d usually delivered the scrolls and stayed out the way, but here he was. Making sure I had space if I needed space. From _Naruto_ of all people.

I took a breath, and finally looked up at him. He was hanging back, shoulders braced, hands pressed flat against his sides. Like he thought I was going to argue again, except this time he wasn’t going to argue back.

“I don’t either,” I said. “I don’t know how to be safe. And I’m scared.” I could’ve hesitated then, but I didn’t, because if I stopped I didn’t know if I’d start again. This wasn't gender. Gender was bullshit, this was something so much more than that. “There are only two Uchiha left and my brother is the strongest ninja I’ve ever met. Anyone who wants a sharingan is looking at me. Has been looking at me since I was seven years old. It doesn’t matter if they want to steal it or if they want to control me or if they just want me to use it for the village, they’re all _looking_ at me, and.” I swallowed. “And I’m _scared,_ Naruto. I’ve been scared forever, and I don’t know what to do.”

He took a step forward, slowly, both he and Urushi waiting on my reaction, then another when I didn’t stop him. I was already lifting my hand by the time he got to me, fingers tangling in his pyjama top as I angled myself to fit in against him as he reached his arms around to hug. “I don’t know what to do,” I repeated into his collar. “He nearly took it, he could come back and I can’t stop him, I don’t -” My breathing hitched and I squeezed my eyes shut in frustration and turned my head to press impossibly closer. “I don’t want to die. I don’t want him to come back. I’m scared. Naruto, I’m scared.”

“I know,” he said, one hand buried in my hair and the other gripping so tight around my back that if I had feeling in my dead arm, it’d be complaining at how fiercely it was being crushed between us. “I know, bastard.” He sounded like he was going to say more but his voice was barely steadier than mine was and he just shook his head and held on while I finally, _finally_ allowed myself to cry.

I’d been almost offensively blasé about Orochimaru since emerging from Gaara’s sand cocoon and finding that he’d gone. Pretending he’d lost interest because I didn’t have a sharingan despite the fact that he was perfectly ready to try and wake it up himself, acting like the forest was the only window he had to give me the curse mark and surviving that one encounter meant I’d survived him. Lying was a talent, and I was good at it, but if I was honest? The tears were long overdue.

Eventually we broke apart. We reclaimed our seats on the sofa, sat next to each other this time and facing forward, with Bull pressed against our legs and Urushi curled neatly on the cushion next to me. Pakkun had no such qualms about personal space and positioned himself squarely across both our laps.

“Your sensei’s running patrols,” he said. “Not sanctioned, and you’re not meant to know, but he’s got the rest of the pack on standby. If anything happens I can call him, Bull will stay with you, and Urushi will buy time. Shiba and Akino aren’t far; Shiba’s watching the building from the outside, Akino’s with Guruko watching Sakura.” He tilted his head, blinked, then continued. “Orochimaru took the Hyuuga girl. The others he impersonated are in the hospital. They’ll survive, but they’re hurt.”

Hinata. If I had the energy I’d feel sick. “Why are you telling us?”

“Because I’m a dog and it affects you. You should know that the village is on high alert and the clans are pushing for war. The Sound genin are being held in custody, and the Hokage has issued a demand for Orochimaru to return the Hyuuga girl and leave Konoha.”

“War,” Naruto repeated grimly. I shifted so I was leaning more heavily against him and tried to juggle the numbers in my head. Orochimaru had been relying on Suna’s support combined with a surprise attack and an enraged Gaara; I didn’t know for certain how strong Sound was, but. Surely not strong enough to risk war?

“He’s not going to back down though, is he?” I asked.

“Even if he doesn’t, you aren’t being left to face him alone,” Pakkun said, with such calm certainty that I couldn’t help but be reassured. “You’re puppies. Both of you. If he attacks, run; the pack will deal with it.” I nodded, and, after a long moment of Pakkun staring him down, Naruto ducked his head and nodded as well.

“Good,” Pakkun said, and settled himself more comfortably across our laps. “You can stay up a bit longer, then it’s bed. You need sleep.”

I frowned, though didn’t lift my head when I glared at him. “We don’t need a bed time -”

“Puppies.”

“Yes, Pakkun.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sasuke: Canon Sasuke and I lived through the same shit but I fell apart while he got stronger  
> Canon Sasuke: hello yes i am mentally stable
> 
> It's been pointed out to me that Japanese is a gender-neutral language, but in the spirt of honesty: I have no idea how to translate that, and I already had this scene written before I knew. So apologies for the lack of accuracy, but please assume pronouns work as they would in English!
> 
> Edit: Thank you so much to everyone who's been discussing how Japanese handles gender down in the comments! With all kudos to you lovely lot, updated translation notes are as follows: In Japanese, Sasuke would have slipped up by using a feminine first person pronoun rather than by refering to herself as she, so though the scene wouldn't exactly translate it would still achieve the same effect. 
> 
> As far as her general speech goes, she is probably starting to bring in more feminine patterns as she gets more comfortable with her gender. Although this is sometimes possible to show in English - like when she tells Haku she's "a shuriken kind of girl" - I'm going to be relying mostly on other cues instead, like using her mother's hair pins or in her choice of clothes. If you like linking in the original Japanese then please assume she adjusts her speech patterns in the same way as she adjusts her appearance to present as a girl, but equally if you'd rather stick to a plain English reading then you're more than welcome to.


	30. Chapter 30

_Interlude: man in a dog mask, dog wearing bandages, toad sage drinking too much sake_

“Are you going to stand there all night? At least buy an old man a drink for his troubles.”

The man in the dog mask stepped forward, but ignored the second half of Jiraiya’s question. “Have you reconsidered?”

“Hm? Oh, yeah. Loads of times. The balcony scene just doesn’t feel right, you know? I like the moonlight, I love the idea of it, but it’s just missing that. That proper sexy _punch_ , needs some more life to it.”

“Jiraiya-sama.”

“Yeah, yeah. I thought you were meant to have lightened up.” He waved the other man off, slouching over his sake and turning the small cup in his hands. “You’re not trying to be a jounin sensei and ANBU at the same time, are you? Thought Sensei would’ve put a stop to that.”

“I was a poor candidate for jounin sensei from the start. They’ll be better with another teacher.”

That got a raised eyebrow and, when the mask remained blank and featureless, a shake of the head. “Didn’t take you for a quitter,” Jiraiya said, part questioning and part… not disappointed, just blunt. “Thought Minato raised you better than that.”

“He’s dead. He left his son in your care.”

“Oi, hold it. I had my reasons. Still have them.” He frowned. Some of them were even good reasons, or at least ones that seemed justifiable at the time. Sure it would’ve been nice to retire and play pretend at raising a kid, but that wasn’t how things worked. There were compromises to be made, lesser evils to be sought after - the world was tarnished, it wasn’t a failing to buckle down and admit that you were too. “What makes it my job pick up your slack? In case you haven’t noticed, there’s a lot going on at the moment. Even if there wasn’t, the girl and the Uchiha are nothing to do with me.”

A pause. The dog - a greyhound, bandages, blue vest, Konoha headband looped at his collar - stayed close to his master. Silent, watchful, steady; ANBU Hound was the same, and his tone was measured when he continued. “You were always going to take Naruto. He won’t leave them. They’re a team. They stay together.”

“Creepy. You got any punctuation to go with those statements?” Jiraiya shuddered for emphasis and took another mouthful of sake. It was chilled, and probably meant to be too expensive to serve hot, but screw it. He didn’t get where he was today by being precious with his alcohol, and it only took a bit of chakra to warm it up. “I was backup for Naruto if he needed it, that’s all. From what I heard, he’s doing fine. Into the finals of the exam and everything.”

“He’s pulling on the kyuubi more often - I don’t know that he’s even aware of how much. His seal is still holding, but he’s not as concerned about it as he should be, and I’m worried he doesn’t understand the implications of what he’s doing.”

“So? Teach him.”

Here, Hound showed an emotion, making a frustrated sound and shifting his weight forward in a quickly stifled show of agitation. “I can’t,” he said, though his voice betrayed none of the conflict his body language did. “Giving a subordinate a technique is different. I can train them, and I can guard them, but I can’t _teach_ them. Any of them. I tried. I failed. They need better than me.”

“And you think a washed up pervy sage is the way forwards? Shit kid, your self esteem is _whack._ Guess what; you’re not special. I had kids. I tried to teach them, I failed, they’re dead. Yours are still alive. Don’t throw them away on someone who doesn’t want them.”

Another pause. Jiraiya poured himself a refill from the clay flask. He’d offer to share it, but Kakashi had never been the drinking sort even when he wasn’t hiding behind his mask, so there didn’t seem to be a point. The dog still hadn’t moved.

When Kakashi finally spoke it was more as himself than as Hound, but all that seemed to do was add a slump to his shoulders and a lost tone to his voice.

“They don’t trust me,” he said. “I didn’t want them either, not at the start. By the time I did, I’d already made mistakes.”

“I’m not your therapist,” Jiraiya cut in, with something akin to alarm.

“You’re Minato’s sensei,” Kakashi replied. “And I made Minato’s son wary of me enough that he pulled on the kyuubi to warn me off his teammate.” Jiraiya blinked, his alarm shifting focus; it didn’t sound like Kakashi was referring to a full jinchuuriki attack, but even if Naruto were just borrowing a few extra teeth and growls that wasn’t something he should be doing in the first place. That he did it against Kakashi said a lot for how much his seal was leaking. Either that, or how bad his relationship with Kakashi was, which wasn’t objectively much better. “They nearly died in the exam, and all I know about it is what the dogs passed on. I’m not a teacher. They need help I don’t understand how to give, and if Orochimaru comes back for Sasuke, I don’t even know that I can stop him.”

Kakashi pulled himself back, and Jiraiya hurried to focus on his drink and replace whatever was on his face with his trademark disregard. “Sounds like a you problem,” he said. “I’ll check Naruto’s seal. And the Uchiha’s. _Maybe_ I’ll hang around, maybe I won’t. I’m a busy man, how do you expect me to produce great art with a bunch of distractions tagging along?

No answer. Both Kakashi and the bandaged dog he had with him were gone.

“Shit, be like that. No wonder you can’t teach them. This fucking village, I swear.”

We didn’t break Sakura out at dawn the next day, because we were now well and truly into summer and dawn occurred at ridiculous o'clock before any of the shops were open to get breakfast. Seeing as Naruto’s suggestion of more cup ramen was both predictable and ignorable and there hadn’t been time to get any fresh food the day before, waiting for the shops was what we had.

“When you’re hokage and I have an ice cream shop,” I said, chivvying a bleary-eyed Naruto towards the eggs, “I’m going to make takeaway breakfast a thing.”

“Why? Breakfast is home food, you need it when you wake up.”

“Because,” I insisted. For a ninja, Naruto was very much not a morning person, and trying to sell him on the concept of coffee in a paper cup and a sticky pastry swirl that you had to somehow eat without a plate would be tricky enough at the best of times. Konoha might have an odd variety of modern technology dotted around the place but it held fast to traditional food, and traditional food demanded a breakfast primarily consisting of rice and bulked out with savoury toppings and protein. Good for ninjas, rubbish for people with sweet teeth, and I steered him stubbornly towards the fruit stall once we’d loaded up on other essentials and got a punnet of grapes and a melon big enough to share.

“Oh, morning Suisei-san!” Naruto said, perking up when we got the counter. “Are you taking a break from missions again?”

“Uzumaki-kun,” the guy returned, and I squinted, trying to place where I knew him from. Purple haori, short messy hair… The haori looked similar to the ones the Rain genin had been wearing, but I didn’t think that was it. “I heard interesting things about the chunin exams, I thought I’d try to watch. Your fights were very impressive.” He nodded at both of us and tactfully didn’t mention that I’d forfeited, though his eyes did linger fractionally on the cut under mine.

Oh. Clothing shop-san. One of the very few on the list of shopkeepers - shop assistants? - who liked Naruto and were therefore allowed to continue, that’s where I recognised him from. I also recognised the faint frown as his gaze skipped from my eye to my arm and even my ribs, which was annoying as I thought I’d been careful to hide the fact that those were injured. Not that they were. Or, my arm was, but my ribs had already subsided to a dull ache that was easy enough to ignore.

I could have scowled. His concern was unasked for and unwanted; I had enough people fussing without adding random bystanders to the list, even if he was being subtle and the only reason I noticed was that I was good enough now at reading people’s expressions with the sharingan that I could pick up their tells without it. On the other hand, I was still riding the odd high from unloading everything on Naruto last night, and I didn’t want a guy at a fruit stall to ruin my good mood. I was no _less_ scared today than I had been before - if anything, finally admitting to myself and to Naruto that Orochimaru could come back at any time and that I had no reason to believe my supposed lack of sharingan would keep him away should have made me more scared, but.

It was hard to explain. The fact that Naruto knew just made it. Better. Naruto knew, and the dogs, and if the dogs knew then Kakashi knew and maybe they’d pass it on to Tsuki to tell Sakura or maybe Naruto would tell her or maybe I could even tell her, but the important thing was that Naruto knew. And he was there, and I was going to have melon for breakfast, and summons _technically_ weren’t meant to be roaming the streets so we’d had to leave Bull behind to watch the flat but Pakkun and Urushi were small enough to get away with, and I was in a good mood.

“Thank you,” I said neutrally instead of flaring up like I might have done, and tuned out the rest of the conversation in favour of juggling everything into a bag and looping it over my good arm. Apparently Suisei was chronically bad at numbers though, because he gave me too much change again.

“He does that for me sometimes,” Naruto confided as we left. “I think he’s just nice. He covers shifts at the weapon shop sometimes as well, and he showed me how to sharpen the practice kunai instead of buying the expensive ones.”

“People aren’t just randomly nice, though. We live in a ninja village.”

“So? Being a ninja doesn’t stop people being nice.”

I swallowed my immediate reply of _being Konoha does_ , because even if the village as a whole was shit I was meant to be in favour of people who could look past that and be decent human beings. Trying to fish around for another way to say it without leaping into a rambling diatribe against clan-murderers and child soldiers though, I hesitated. If your starting point was the fundamental moral compass of us or them, and _us_ was the village and anything done in its service was therefore justified and correct - which was a simplified but not inaccurate version of the morals Konoha taught - then… Ninja could be nice.

Which sounded ridiculously stupid for the weird conflict that was happening in my brain, but. By the standards I’d inherited from my old world, Konoha was so far wrong that no one could be trusted. Even Iruka, as genuine as he seemed, had patiently taught a classful of little kids to kill people and led us through the steps of how to use basic torture and intimidation in a field interrogation. It made everything he did suspect. How could he ever have my best interests at heart if he was telling me to go out and stab people and put myself in the path of getting stabbed in return?

But I wasn’t in my old world. Without that lens to view everything through, Iruka wasn’t a bad guy turning me into something I shouldn’t have to be. He was… Giving me the tools I needed to make sure I’d survive? It still didn’t feel right. People who trained child soldiers weren’t nice, any more than people who made an effort to watch children be pitted against each other and potentially die in the process for the sake of politics in the chunin exams. At the same time though, I couldn’t find anything actively _harmful_ in a random shop guy giving too much change or taking the time to teach Naruto how to sharpen kunai, not unless I concocted an elaborate plot about playing the long con and lulling people into a false sense of security, and even for my paranoia that seemed a bit much.

“... Maybe,” I said. Naruto flashed me a happy grin and I rolled my eyes at him and turned to Urushi and Pakkun instead. “Do you eat? I didn’t get meat, but there’s extra rice and eggs if you want.”

Urushi’s ears went up, but Pakkun huffed what sounded like a laugh. “We’re good, Pup,” he said. “Things work differently for summons.”

 _Do they,_ I thought as Urushi drooped. I slowed a fraction so he fell in step with me, then signed a discrete _delay mission, require stealth_ against my hip. He didn’t do anything so obvious as wag his tail, but the ear twitch he gave showed his understanding, as did the way he stuck close for the rest of the trip to the hospital, and I made a mental note to double check what foods would be safe for him to eat.

“We bring breakfast,” I announced as we dropped in through the window I assumed Sakura had left open for us. “We have to go home and cook it, but close enough.”

“Morning, Sasuke-chan, Naruto,” Sakura replied, grinning. “I thought you said you’d be here at dawn, I’ve been waiting for ages.”

“Hime didn’t think ramen was good enough for you,” Naruto explained. “We had to wait for the market.”

“It’s _bastard_ , damnit.”

“When you’re not being fussy,” he agreed easily. “We brought ramen for Chouji, we could have brought ramen for everyone.”

I stuck my tongue out. We brought ramen for Chouji because Chouji had asked for salt in the tower, and I didn’t know if he still needed it or not but whatever other nutrients ramen lacked salt it could certainly do. We’d also brought a packet of Akimichi-brand chips and the grapes, and I left them stacked in a neat pile on his bedside table.

“He was awake earlier,” Sakura said quietly behind me when I lingered, unsure if he’d prefer to be left to sleep or be sad to have missed us. “They’ve got him eating every few hours to put the weight back on, even during the night. He’s fine, just tired I think.”

“Of course he is,” I said back, equally quietly. “He took a damn soldier pill so he could watch the matches with us instead of going straight for treatment. What did he expect. Honestly.” Did ramen, chips and grapes have enough calories? Oil and sugar, but not much else. “Ino’s coming back later, right? She’ll bring him more food, she knows what he likes.”

“Sasuke-chan, he’s _fine._ The nurses know what they’re doing.”

I paused, but even if I did try to steal him and hide him somewhere safe, I wouldn’t actually be helping. “Ok,” I said, shaking my head and stepping back. “Ok. He’s tired, he needs sleep, we need to go. Shift. Pakkun and Urushi are out the window, c’mon.”

“I need to check out at the front desk,” Sakura said, moving to the door. “Naruto, can you send them a clone and ask them to meet us there?”

“Check out,” I repeated, scrunching up my nose as I followed her. We were ninja. We were meant to escape through windows, it was part of the job description. _Check out,_ honestly.

We didn’t make it to the front desk. This, see, was exactly why ninjas used windows.

“ _Uchiha,_ ” someone called, way too loudly, striding down the corridor towards us. I spun, stiffening on reflex, and barely had a moment to recognise Anko with Kurenai on her heels before Sakura and Naruto had moved to block her path.

“You got a seal,” she said, pointing aggressively and completely ignoring them. “Why the fuck has no one looked at it. Did you even get _healed_ you little idiot, what kind of - girl, _move._ ”

“How did you know I had a seal?” I asked, holding myself warily as she all but bared her teeth at Sakura. She didn’t look great. Her normally wild ponytail had progressed into the sort of mess that came from repeatedly taking it out and retying it and from the expression on her face she was running on not much sleep and a lot of stress.

“Don’t ask questions. Don’t _hide_ things that could get you killed, did Hatake teach you that? He’s shit. You’re shit. Show me your neck.”

“She doesn’t have to show you anything,” Naruto snapped, moving more decisively in between us. “What do you mean _could get you killed_?”

“I mean what I said, twerp, or did none of you shits _think_ -”

“Anko,” Kurenai said warningly, moving in to defuse the situation, and Anko made a frustrated sound and cut across her.

“Orochimaru sucks ass. If he sealed you, you need it contained, and I don’t give a flying fuck that Hatake has authority or that you’re trying to be cagey and keep it secret. It will drive you mad. It will fuck you up. I don’t like letting that guy’s plans go to plan. Show me your damn neck.”

The blunt revelations as to how dangerous seals could be clearly threw Sakura and Naruto, and they hesitated.

“It’s not that kind of seal,” I said, trying to keep my voice as even as I could, as much reassuring them as defending myself against Anko. “It wasn’t meant for me, and it’s not driving me mad. It just makes my arm numb.”

Anko squinted disbelievingly, but Kurenai spoke before she could. “If that’s the case, and if _your sensei’s_ dealing with it, then that’s good.” The way she emphasised _your sensei_ was aimed at Anko, a clear reminder that other jounin’s genin were off limits, no matter how necessary you thought the interference was. At least, off limits outside clan matters or unless you happened to be the Hokage, but neither of those currently applied. “We’re sorry for bothering you, and congratulations on your achievements in the exam,” Kurenai continued, then bowed, somewhat distractedly, and turned to go, one arm hooked firmly through Anko’s to drag her along. 

Anko didn’t go without protest. “That’s bullshit and you know it -”

“Wait,” Sakura said. “You’re Team Eight’s sensei, aren’t you?”

They paused. “I’m sorry,” Kurenai said, not looking back. “They’re not taking visitors at the moment. I’ll pass on that you were asking after them.”

Sakura hid a worried expression, and I remembered with a start that we hadn’t yet told her about last night and what Pakkun had said.

“Because of Hinata,” I blurted, then winced. Next to me Naruto froze with wide eyes, and I tensed as Kurenai turned slowly back to us. I swear I’m a sneaky ninja who can keep secrets. Most of the time. With all eyes on me though and Sakura’s expression of rapidly dawning horror as she tried to work out what I meant, I had very little hope of deflecting. So. I raised my chin, and didn’t. “It’s classified because of Hinata, right?”

Kurenai held my stare, then shook her head. “How do you - no, I don’t want to know. Don’t tell me.” She blinked, and frowned at us. “I’m serious. If it’s a lucky guess, I don’t care. Kiba and Shino are awake, it’ll be good for them to see friends. Don’t make me regret letting you in.”

I nodded, taken aback by her quick capitulation, but from the exhausted set to her shoulders she was serious about not caring. I wondered if she actually agreed with the village’s decision to basically isolate Team Eight to keep Hinata’s disappearance secret; it made sense as far as not losing face in front of the other villages - a heiress was a hell of a thing to misplace, and for one of your own missing nin to infiltrate your security to do it was an embarrassment at best - but I hadn’t actually considered how hard it would be on Kiba and Shino themselves to not be allowed to talk to anyone.

We trailed behind as Kurenai led the way, Anko stalking beside her and shooting us a variety of distrusting glares. Between us Naruto and I filled Sakura in on what Pakkun told us and she looked grimly shaken at the prospect of war.

“The Hyuuga and Aburame are two of the highest ranking clans in the village,” she said. “If they both want blood, I don’t know if anyone could stop them.”

I bit my lip on the instinctive _we outrank them_ that I almost said. The Uchiha didn’t outrank anyone anymore, and though I was nominally a clan head I had none of the influence my dad had had. The Hokage could technically overrule them, and the Akimichi were the other noble clan, particularly with the Nara and the Yamanaka block-voting with them, but realistically, the odds weren’t in our favour.

Though. Realistically, the odds weren’t in Orochimaru’s favour either. Sound was too small for war, that was surely the whole point of teaming up with Suna and invading through the exams. Without the element of surprise - and, if Rasa pulled through for me, without Suna - the best he could hope for would be to make victory hurt, and he must’ve known that when he took Hinata. The whole fiasco with Kumo when we were little was hardly kept secret; targeting the byakugan was practically _inviting_ the Hyuuga to froth at the mouth and overreact.

I wouldn’t be surprised if the Inuzuka joined them, looking at Kiba. Shino was sitting somewhat stiffly on the edge of his bed with his feet neatly together on the floor, but Kiba was still in bad shape, leaning back against the headboard and occasionally gripping the sheets for support.

“My head doesn’t work,” he said flatly, answering the unasked question. He lifted a hand to the wad of gauze over his ear, held in place by bandages that circled his head almost like a headband. “Can’t hear out that side. Can’t balance. Can’t walk. Can’t do anything.”

“Yet,” Shino said stubbornly, hunching his shoulders. “Can’t walk yet.”

“Will maybe get enough balance for walking over the next month or so,” Kiba shot back. “ _Maybe_ if I’m _lucky_ be able to do meditative katas.”

“Which is by definition not nothing.”

“Sure. Great. Let me just save Hinata by _wobbling_ after her, stunning plan Shino.”

“Have they heard anything?” Sakura asked, heading off what sounded like the start of a recurring argument. “Did Orochimaru say why he wanted her?”

“Take a guess,” Kiba said, gesturing at me - or, more specifically, at the cut under my eye that was glaring evidence that Orochimaru had tried to steal it.

Naruto made a noise of protest. “He didn’t try to kidnap the bastard though. He just wanted her eyes.”

“He wouldn’t have needed to kidnap Uchiha,” Shino said, when it looked like Kiba was just going to snap again. “Why? Because Uchiha doesn’t have a self-destruct technique to protect his kekkei genkai.”

I leaned forward, internally debating how much I was supposed to know. The darker secrets of the caged bird seal were, well, dark secrets, but it wouldn't be out of the realm of possibility for me to know of the more practical aspects like Shino was alluding to. “I thought only branch Hyuuga were sealed. Hinata’s main house, isn’t she?”

Kiba snorted. “She still knows how it works. Or she said she did.” He made a sound of disgust and an aborted attempt to throw his hands up that resulted in him closing his eyes and - presumably - waiting for the world to stop spinning while Akamaru pressed close and whined. “Who knows,” he said bitterly, still with his eyes closed. “I nearly died and Shino got whammied, she could’ve said anything to get him to stop.”

I blinked, trying to parse that. “Wait,” I said, glancing at Shino for confirmation. Out the corner of my eye I noticed that Sakura had gone still, clearly understanding the same thing I had. “Hinata threatened to self-destruct herself and her eyes… so that Orochimaru would let you two go?”

“Sasuke-chan -”

“And it _worked?_ ” Could I use that? No, it was counter productive. I wasn’t self-destructive. But if it was a _bluff?_

“We’re here, aren’t we?” Kiba said, glaring. “What, surprised she was brave enough?”

“No,” I said, distracted. It’d have to be a damn believable bluff, I didn’t have a history of crazy family seals to protect me there, and Orochimaru would know that sharingans were stupidly easy to transplant. The immolation jutsu, maybe? I’d set myself on fire a bit with it before, and it was _designed_ for burning dead bodies, so. But it took a while to heat up. And was too obscure to use as a bluff, and a surprise way to melt my eyes was the exact opposite of what I needed.

“It’s surprising that Orochimaru allowed it,” Sakura said with a hard look at me. “There’d be nothing to stop him agreeing to Hinata’s terms then killing you anyway once she was immobilised. It’s ridiculously lucky that it worked and it probably wouldn’t work again.”

“She won’t try it,” Naruto told her, with such faith in me that I had to refrain from looking down and feeling suddenly guilty about my thoughts. Sakura still thought my survival instinct was awol, of course she was worried about me getting inspired by someone else’s self-sacrificing tendencies. Hot on the heels of the guilt though came annoyance; just because a technique _could_ be used like Hinata had used it didn’t mean it had to be. Threatening Orochimaru to back off from _me_ or lose access to my eyes was just as valid, and even if it was risky, if I ran out of other options it was worth a shot.

I wasn’t so distracted by the thought though that I didn’t notice the way Shino tensed at what Sakura said, nor the way Kiba noted his reaction and cast around for something to change the subject. “It doesn’t matter how it worked, it just worked. Hinata’s alive. We’ll get her back. It doesn’t need to work again, because it won’t _have_ to work again.”

From the way Shino leaned forward further and gripped the edge of the bed until his knuckles turned white, it was the wrong thing to say. “Get her eyes back,” he corrected, a dark edge of anger that I’d never heard before in his usually level voice. “Because the village protects its resources but a ninja’s duty is to serve, not to be served.”

I stared. With his dark glasses and high collar, I couldn’t see enough of his face to read his expression, but the amount of _bitterness_ he said it with completely threw me.

“Shino,” Kiba said, and even Akamaru hopped down to approach him with a beseeching whine.

“But her family,” I protested, mind reeling. The Hyuuga were _infamously_ protective, even if their branch members would rather they weren’t. Hinata wasn’t me, she wasn’t facing the village by herself as the last holder of eyes the village wanted - _Shino_ wasn’t me, he hadn’t lived through the village murdering his entire family, what the hell?

“Her clan won’t protect her. Her father hates her.” He seemed to be building steam, ignoring Kiba’s attempts to get his attention. “The village treats itself like a colony whose workers can be easily replaced -”

“That’s enough, Shino-kun,” Kurenai interrupted, striding back into the room with Anko following closely behind. “Team Seven, thank you for visiting. Remember that Hinata-chan’s circumstances are still classified, please don’t talk to anyone about what you learnt.” She started chivvying us towards the door and, still somewhat blindsided by the abrupt downturn, we waved an awkward goodbye and started to go.

“Wait - Kurenai-sensei, hang on - _shit._ ”

I turned back; Kiba looked like he’d tried to get out of bed, but his eyes were squeezed shut in pain and he was leaning so far forwards he was almost bent double in an effort not to overbalance. Kurenai grimaced, but didn’t back down.

“I’m sorry, Kiba-kun -”

“No, I mean, wait.” He pointed at - near - me. “ _She_? Also. Sasuke-chan?”

Ah. My turn to tense, though I swallowed and tried not to. I could play it off, but I’d only been keeping it a secret before because I was trying to work it out in my own head, not because it was dangerous for people to know. I glanced back at the other two, then shook my head and angled myself towards the door again. “I’m a girl, dick,” I said over my shoulder, as offhandedly as I could. “Did you only just notice? God Inuzuka, keep up.” 

And then I absolutely didn’t run away before he could react. I sauntered. Calmly. Head full of thoughts about Shino’s odd anger, the fact that Anko was there - though, she and Kurenai were friends, it could just be that - actually was that likely if everything was classified? - and what Sakura had said about Orochimaru going back on his word as soon as Hinata was incapacitated and her self destruct jutsu was no longer a threat.

All very worthy thoughts for a head to be full of. No space for comments from the peanut gallery. Gender was bullshit. End of. Moving on.

I slowed at the end of the corridor, looking at the other two with a worried frown. They weren’t just worthy thoughts, they were downright _alarming_ because either Shino had been hiding a bitter grudge against Konoha for most of the years I knew him - doubtful, but he kept to himself and I’d never bothered to get to know him very well - or… Or Orochimaru had given him a seal to help his anger along.

“Where do you want to go for breakfast?” Sakura said, too brightly, and signed a discrete _classified_ with her hands as she did so.

“Home,” Naruto said. “The bastard wanted to cook.”

“I’m cooking, am I,” I muttered, but there was no heat in it. A _seal_. On Shino? I might have been reading it wrong. I must have been reading it wrong. Why the hell would he seal _Shino_? Just because the Aburame were one of the big clans? To cause chaos? Because he thought Shino wouldn’t survive? There was no way he wanted his bugs. As fitting as a host-symbiote relationship might be for him, the kikachu fell way outside the perimeter of things Orochimaru could use to make himself stronger.

I shook my head. “I’m cooking,” I repeated, reminding myself that Naruto’s culinary skills were… enthusiastic, but basic. He made a good sous chef. Not that I made a particularly accomplished head chef, but I at least knew the principles of _stirring_ the fry to make stir fry, so. Naruto’s flat was closer to ANBU headquarters and more defensible, but we had at least two dogs and I needed to get clothes anyway - I was currently in Naruto’s spares. And for all that Naruto had practically moved in with me, Sakura had still never been to the Uchiha district; if I wanted her not to jump to conclusions like what she thought I’d do with Hinata’s self-destruction idea, then, potentially, I needed to be a bit more open with her so she’d know what I’d actually do instead.

Still. I hesitated. For the big things, it still felt like I was only open with Naruto because he happened to be there when I inevitably reached the breaking point, and the only way I knew to work through things was to rage at him and let him help me put myself back together again after. I couldn’t do that with Sakura. I’d already burnt throught the anger, and without it, I didn’t know how to say the things I meant. But she was still Sakura, and leaving her out of the loop didn’t feel right either.

And by now we’d reached the front desk and checked out and picked up Pakkun and Urushi again - and Guruko, and I blinked at him in surprise until I remembered that he and Akino had been watching Sakura last night - and it was just a house. The question wasn’t anything life threatening, it was _where are we having breakfast,_ and I was turning it into an anxiety-inducing mess like an idiot.

“Come on,” I said, shaking myself out of it and telling myself to grow up. “My house is this way.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Konoha: We're going to keep these two kids in isolation despite their traumatic experience so no one knows what happened to them or their missing teammate  
> Kurenai: we're what
> 
> (also, for those wondering; Naruto was pulling on the kyuubi liberally during the preliminaries, including during the conversation between Sasuke and Kakashi about whether or not she'd be able to forfeit. Sasuke noticed the growling, Kakashi noticed the kyuubi.)


	31. Chapter 31

I didn’t watch Sakura’s reaction to my house. Some things had changed in the month Naruto had been living with me, some things hadn’t; we still avoided the front entrance and hopped over the fence to go in the back, I still didn’t have house slippers or anywhere to leave sandals that wasn’t in a pile by the door. What had been a cosy but sparsely decorated space when it was just me was now verging on cramped: two stools by the counter, bulkier clothes piled in the gap between the wall and the sideboard because there wasn’t space for two peoples’ to fit folded inside. I hadn’t made good on my threat to install bunkbed futons, but there were two sets of pillows stacked on top of the neatly rolled bedding, and Plushie-tan balanced precariously on top of that. His usual space on the sideboard was taken up with the photo of our mothers, and a potted cactus Naruto had brought round one day and forgotten to take home.

“House,” I said, waving vaguely at the room as I beelined towards the kitchen-half of the kitchen. “Bathroom’s through that door if you need it, I’ll make tea.” I didn’t mention the other door; it was fairly obvious that it led through to the main rooms, and also fairly obvious that I didn’t use it.

“It’s… a very nice house,” Sakura said, clearly struggling with inbuilt laws of politeness. I snorted, but still kept my gaze focussed squarely on the leaves I was measuring into the teapot. Any of my attention left over was cataloguing the way the dogs were trying to find an out of the way corner to sprawl in; there weren’t many to choose from, but they weren’t big dogs, and Guruko was a fan of high places so he at least was happy to colonise the top of the fridge. Urushi ended up under the counter by my feet, Pakkun plonked himself squarely in the middle of the floor and waited for Sakura to step around him.

“It’s stupid,” I corrected her. “The entire Uchiha district to choose from, and I live in a one room mess because I’m too pathetic to move out.”

“You’re not too pathetic,” Naruto said, brushing past me to get the cups. “It’s your family’s house. Family are important. Of course you live here. Anyway, you wouldn’t have your garden if you moved.”

I quirked a half-smile at him, only noticing that my shoulders had been tensed when they relaxed a fraction at his words. And when I noticed that, I shook myself out of my defensiveness, and looked up at Sakura. “I’ll show you the garden after,” I promised her. “I need to make you a better paralytic, I think I have the right plants.”

She still looked awkward, unable to deny my blunt criticism of my living situation but equally unwilling to be harsh enough to agree with me. I stubbornly refused to regret what I said, or showing her the house, because there was no point; the fact that I lived right next door to where my parents were murdered _was_ stupid, and if I was trying to be more honest with her - with _me_ \- then it would be even more stupid to try and pretend that it wasn’t. And despite what Naruto said, I was pathetic. In many ways. I was just, also, a work in progress. So. So there.

Unloading the biggest of my fears onto Naruto last night was a hell of a pick-me-up, but even it had its limits, and I was fast approaching them. I was turning defensive, even in my thoughts, and gearing myself up for an argument. I didn’t know why. I had no reason to expect Sakura to be difficult, all I needed to do was tell her that her assumptions were wrong and I didn’t like the way she treated me because of them, it should be _easy_. I’d already told Naruto, and that turned out so well I didn’t have a way to phrase it that didn’t sound sarcastic. It wasn’t like I cared about Sakura any less, so why was it so damn _hard_ to say things?

“You need to stop being overprotective,” I blurted, too fast and too sudden and way too loud despite the fact that I didn’t actually raise my voice. Also too aggressive. Was it? It sounded too aggressive to me. I _really_ didn’t want an argument. How the frick did you tell someone you didn’t like what they did without it being an accusation, was this a life lesson I’d missed somewhere? Somehow I felt that following Itachi’s method of character critique was not the right answer here.

Sakura frowned, just a fraction, slight enough that I could tell she was trying not to. “I… didn’t realise I was being,” she said cautiously.

“You are.” I could let myself doubt everything and pull back from the conversation and just leave things as they were, that would be the easy route, but I could also _not_ do any of that. “You don’t treat me as a full member of the team. I’m like… Tsuki. I’m like Tsuki.”

“Sasuke-chan, _what._ Of course you’re a full member of the team.”

“No, I mean, I know, but.” I tugged on my fringe in frustration and tried to find a way to word it so it made sense. “Tsuki’s a puppy, so you have to make allowances for her, right? She’s the tracker, and she’s good at what she does, but you wouldn’t let her come up with a plan or fight like she keeps asking to because she’s a _puppy._ And with Naruto you trust him to be sensible, but with me, you keep specifying things and saying I run into battles I can’t handle, and if I do have to make a decision for myself then I feel like you think I just. Decide _._ Or don’t decide, just randomly jump in without thinking, or think but think wrong, or just react, or.” I trailed off helplessly, struggling to explain. “Like Tsuki,” I finished, spreading my hand and hoping that worked.

She didn’t reply straight away, and I busied myself with the tea and the rice and all the other assorted things I was meant to be doing to make breakfast. Naruto moved around me seamlessly despite how small the kitchen area was, but he kept deliberately quiet and out of the conversation. Not pointedly - he was still very much _there_ if either of us needed him, just. Not interfering.

“I don’t think you’re a puppy,” Sakura finally said, wrapping her hands round the cup I passed her and holding them there. She looked like she’d quite like to have cooking to occupy them with as well, but as she was a guest, the cup was what she had. “I don’t think you’re like Tsuki either.”

“But you do think I’m reckless.” Did dogs like tea? Pakkun had seemed entirely disinterested in anything food related earlier, but I retrieved a bowl and poured out the last of the pot for Urushi anyway. He _had_ come to sit under the counter, directly in my line of sight but hidden from the rest of the room, and his expression seemed a bit too hopeful to ignore. “You said I was in Wave, and you said I didn’t care enough if I died in the forest.”

“You _were_ reckless in Wave,” she pointed out neutrally. “With Haku, but also in the way you fought. But,” and here she ducked her head in acknowledgement, “You aren’t now. Not with taijutsu, at least.”

I suppressed a flash of sourness at that. We’d been fresh genin in Wave; of course my taijutsu had got better. All our taijutsu had got better, and it wasn’t like she and Naruto had been faultless in the way they’d fought either. But if I actually tried to think back, it wasn’t like she and Naruto had charged in to fight the demon brothers either, or used a technique that left them vulnerable over a large body of water when they knew they couldn’t swim. If I was honest, Wave felt a lot further away and a lot less relevant to me than it probably was, but at the same time I didn’t think it was fair for Sakura to still be basing her judgement of me on things I’d done before I’d started treating the team as a team.

“Hinata’s strategy of threatening to destroy her eyes unless Orochimaru let her team go was a valid one,” I said, putting Wave aside. “It gave her an advantage against someone she couldn’t otherwise hope to beat. She probably saved Kiba and Shino’s lives.”

Here, Sakura was on more stable ground, and she leaned forwards to reply. “At the cost of her own, or if not her life, then at the very least her freedom. It was a massive risk to take and even when it paid off, it wasn’t a solution her team wanted.”

“They faced _Orochimaru._ Nothing about the situation was what they wanted. If she hadn’t taken the risk they’d probably all be dead, because sometimes life is shit and sometimes the solutions you want aren’t possible so you have to settle for what you _can_ do instead.”

She grimaced. “I know. I’m not expecting everything to always have an easy answer, I’m well aware people need to prioritise and sometimes their choices suck. Obviously I know that.”

Rice on; I couldn’t do the eggs until the rice was cooked, but melon waited for no man. Melon was also spherical and in danger of rolling off the worktop, but I waved Naruto off when he tried to help. I had an arm of water chakra; if I could use it to snag shuriken from midair, I could use it to keep my damn breakfast still while I cut it into pieces.

“So why are people reckless if their only choices suck and they have to choose one anyway? Hinata wouldn’t have sacrificed herself if there was another way to save her team. I wouldn’t have talked to Gaara if I didn’t think it would’ve worked, or got Orochimaru away from you if I thought there was any chance we could’ve beat him.”

“Are you honestly trying to convince me you _weren’t_ reckless?” she shot back. “I know you, Sasuke-chan. I _saw_ you panic when you realised Shikamaru was in the sand. You knew you weren’t thinking, that’s why you were so defensive about it afterwards.”

I scowled at the melon. Maybe I had panicked. That didn’t automatically mean I was wrong. “Not everyone thinks as fast as you do,” I said instead of admitting anything. She’d read it from my lack of denial anyway, there was no point actually saying it. “I didn’t have time to work out all the steps. There was a problem, I had a solution, and if I’d waited until I was sure it was the best one I’d miss my chance and end up with no solution at all.”

“I get that,” she said. “And I’m glad it worked out and I’m glad everyone survived, but you were lucky.”

“We’re ninja. If we never took risks we’d never do anything. Everything we do relies on at least some luck.” Like slipping Urushi two more-or-less evenly hacked cubes of melon; Pakkun couldn’t see - I didn’t know that he’d actually mind even if he did, to be honest - and my quick glance up at the fridge showed Guruko to not be paying attention, but I was still risking getting caught. Not a big risk, but. Still a risk.

He took them surprisingly delicately, and licked my thumb hopefully for more.

“And ninjas who only rely on luck end up dead when their luck runs out,” Sakura said, frowning. “The more you allow yourself to panic and make rash decisions, the more chances there are of that happening.”

“I’m not - _allow_ myself to panic? Right, sorry, let me just give myself a stern talking to and not do that then.”

She huffed, and gave me an unimpressed look. “I’m not saying you do it on purpose. But if I know that you panic, then I should make sure you’re not put in a position where you’re forced to make a decision while you’re compromised. And, if I know that you consider sacrifice plays to be acceptable solutions, then I should _also_ make sure you’re not in a position where you can make sacrifice plays, because if I don’t then I’m not doing my job as team leader in keeping you alive.”

I’d run out of melon to chop, and moved on to portioning it out to the bowls Naruto had set out for me. There were six. Should I put one down for Pakkun anyway, even though he’d said he didn’t want it? Guruko had hopped down from the fridge and, by pure coincidence, found himself sitting by my ankles and with his head tilted up and his tail wagging very gently against the floor.

“Sacrifice plays are acceptable solutions,” I said stubbornly, glaring at the sixth bowl. If I fed Pakkun, it’d be pretty obvious that I was feeding the other two. If I didn’t feed Pakkun and he already knew I was feeding the other two, which he probably did anyway, then he might feel left out. But he’d said he didn’t want human food, so I shouldn’t feed him.

Sakura on the hand just glared straight at me, and fine. We’d tried being reasonable and not having an argument about it, but I’d run out of cooking, and she refused to budge in her views, so _fine._ Arguing I could do. I was good at arguing, but Naruto interrupted before I could.

“Not if you’re trying to stay alive,” he said, quietly, leaning back against the counter. There was nothing accusatory in what he said, but I still held myself too tightly so I didn’t hunch defensively from it. Also, Pakkun was on the counter next to him, because Pakkun had no regard for where it was and wasn’t appropriate for a pug to sit, and from that angle he would’ve seen exactly how much melon Urushi and Guruko had eaten. Which was. Great.

“I _am_ trying.”

“I know,” he said, still quietly. “So does Sakura -” and that, I was vindicated to note, came with a heavy stare in her direction until, I assumed, she broke eye contact and acquiesced “- and we know you wouldn’t do it unless you thought there was no other choice. But that doesn’t mean we have to like it, and it doesn’t mean we can’t try to make sure that it’s not necessary.”

I still didn’t hunch, or make myself smaller, but I didn’t scowl at him either and my will to argue deflated. “I’m not asking her to like it,” I protested. “But if the way she makes sure I don’t take risks is to make other people take risks instead, then that’s not fair.”

“I’m not -” she stopped, and when she started again her voice was steadier. “I don’t want _anyone_ to take risks. Or make sacrifices. I’m trying to keep everyone alive.”

When I looked over at her, she was holding herself just as carefully and miserably as I was, except she didn’t have Urushi by her feet to lean against her. I hesitated, but I’d brought the conversation up, so I felt like I needed to see it through. “If I hadn’t saved Shikamaru, he’d’ve died,” I said, trying to aim for Naruto’s quiet statement of truth and almost certainly falling short. “If I hadn’t taken Orochimaru away from you and Naruto, you could’ve died. If Hinata hadn’t threatened to destroy her eyes, Kiba and Shino would probably have died.”

“I know,” she said, too sharply, then shook her head and started again. “I know. And it shouldn’t be on you to save everyone and Hinata shouldn’t have had to give herself up and we shouldn’t be on the edge of going to war and a lot of things are happening that shouldn’t and I _know._ ” She paused, taking a breath that was just this side of ragged, and I hovered awkwardly, torn between wanting to make things ok and still needing her to see that they weren’t. “But I can’t do anything about that. I’m not team leader for everyone, I’m team leader for you and Naruto, and you’re the one who’s in the most danger so you’re the one I’m trying most to keep alive.”

“By refusing to let me take risks and not trusting me to make my own decisions.”

“I’m trying to keep you _alive_ ,” she repeated. “It’s my _job_.”

“Actually,” Pakkun cut in, “It’s mine.” We both blinked at him, thrown by the unexpected statement, and he tilted his head. “At the moment, anyway. It’s your sensei’s job, and he left you in my care, and that makes it my job.”

“But,” Sakura started, and she and I shared an unsure glance. “But I’m team leader?”

“You’re a puppy,” Pakkun corrected. “You’re small, you get over excited about things, and you try to run too fast for your paws. Pup,” he said, turning to me. “Your life is dangerous. It’s not your fault that you have to take risks and it’s not your fault that the risks you take have disastrous consequences if they go wrong, but that doesn’t change the fact that you take risks. If life was fair you could make your mistakes and they’d go wrong and you’d learn from them, but you don’t have that luxury and you need to be more careful because of it.” Then, barely giving me time to absorb that, he turned to Sakura. “Pup,” he said again, not even changing his inflection, “It’s easy to assume that someone is doing worse than you because they aren’t as good as you or they aren’t trying as hard, but it’s also easy to miss the things that are holding them back if you only look at them from the outside. A pack that trusts two thirds of its strength is two thirds as strong, and if you want to keep yours alive you need to be stronger than that.”

He looked between us, somehow with far more weight than a small dog in a henohenomoheji jacket should be able to bring to bear, and we shuffled in place and dipped our heads. It didn’t feel like a telling off, not quite, but it felt like _something_ and Sakura and I were united in the awkward feeling of having done something wrong and being faced with someone who was being… not disappointed, but. Understanding about it.

“And, Pup,” Pakkun continued, and I braced myself as he turned to face me again. “You need to stop giving them melon,” he said, scowling down at the other two dogs. Urushi lay down with his head on his paws and looked up soulfully, but Garuko sneezed and yipped an offended denial. Pakkun sneezed back and refused to be moved. “There’s a _reason_ we don’t eat human food,” he told him. “Stop taking advantage of the puppies not knowing better, you’ll set a bad example.”

A reason? I perked up, curious despite myself, but bit my tongue on asking. Summons were notoriously close-lipped about their secrets with anyone outside their clan - hell, even within clans they could be wary of people who hadn’t yet signed their contract. We got away with a lot from the dogs because we were Kakashi’s kids (and, I think, because the dogs were pretty lax about most things) but it would still be too rude for me to ask.

Naruto on the other hand didn’t know enough about clans and summons for it to stop him. “What’s the reason?”

Not that it did either of us much good; Pakkun just raised an eyebrow in a way that made his whole ear twitch up and said dryly, “We’re summons.”

Breakfast was… quiet. Not a bad quiet. Not even really a thoughtful quiet, though there was a lot, potentially, to think about. Just quiet. Sometimes life was. We had it outside by the pond, partly because there was more space, partly because I’d promised to show Sakura the garden and wanted her to meet the fish.

Meet the fish. What I actually wanted was for her to know they were there and how to look after them in case I couldn’t. It wasn’t the fish’s fault they were trapped in a pond and dependent on other people to keep them alive. It wasn’t their fault the person they were stuck depending on had been planning to run away and abandon them, and even if I stayed for the meanwhile, there were too many ways things could go wrong. Little things. Missions taking too long - I’d been lucky that I knew to expect it for Wave and had set up their food in advance, but you couldn’t always predict when you’d be away for too long, and little things like that could be just as damaging to them. Not everything that needed worrying about was life or death.

If I mentioned it now though I knew that’s what it would sound like, and while it was arguably _less_ reckless of me to consider the consequences of my death to people - and fish - who I’d leave behind, it also wasn’t something I wanted to bring up. Or think about. If I was dead I was dead, who cared what happened when I wasn’t there to see?

I paused, chopsticks hovering in place and rice grains slowly dropping back into my bowl.

Left. Not died. I needed Sakura to look after the fish after I _left._ Had been planning to run away - that was the wrong tense. Was _still_ planning to run away. Itachi was still the endgame. Konoha was the enemy, my brother was safety, and anything else was a distraction. Distractions were dangerous. Whatever progress I was making on my garden, on dealing with the issues I knew I had, that didn’t _matter_. You didn’t sit someone down who was drowning and ask them to talk about their fear of water, you got them out of the damn ocean and made sure they could breathe.

I bit my lip, staving off the disloyal thought that said _Kakashi fixed that, though._ I wasn’t talking about an actual fear of water. Bubblehead no jutsu didn’t fix the rest of me.

But neither did stubbornly refusing to face anything. It wasn’t disloyal to want to be someone better, even if I was relying on Konoha people to help me. I didn’t want to be the same mess of a person I had been before. I wasn’t, anyway. I was a girl now. And - and Naruto and Sakura weren’t Konoha. They were just _in_ Konoha, but so was I, and maybe the progress I was making didn’t leave me any less at risk than I was before, but that didn’t mean it didn’t matter.

I frowned, the thought sticking in my head, and I turned to the sideboard after we’d finished clearing up. “Do you have a bag?” I asked Naruto. “I only have my backpack. If I’m staying with you, I want more than a backpack of clothes.” I tugged at the borrowed shirt I was wearing and wrinkled my nose for effect. “Not that yours aren’t nice or anything.”

He rolled his eyes and produced, naturally, an orange holdall-shaped clone. “Should I just grab them all? You go through a lot.”

“Yes, because I change _out_ of my sweaty training clothes and wash them like a reasonable human being. I go through a perfectly normal amount, it’s not my fault people think shinobi fabric doesn’t get dirty so fast.”

“You wear three outfits a day. I don’t think my washing machine is big enough to cope.”

I stuck my tongue out at that. His washing machine would be fine. If it wasn’t, I’d get him an early birthday present, because there were some things in life I wasn’t willing to do without. But I also used the cover of grabbing clothes from the sideboard to nab a crumpled bundle from the back corner that I’d shoved in there over a month ago and forgotten about, and tried very hard to be casual as I picked up a clean top and waved myself off to the bathroom to change.

I wasn’t doing anything suspicious. Or wrong. I was just. Changing. Into clothes that I owned, because I bought them, and the colour suited me and the loose material would be comfy for summer, and it was fine. It was _good._

It was good enough, in fact, that I stood in front of the bathroom mirror after I’d stripped off the clothes I was wearing, and forced myself to look up and not hate my reflection. Not that - it wasn’t a bad reflection, if I saw it on anyone else it’d be fine, but that was the thing. It was fine, but it had never felt like mine. I’d never _made_ it feel like mine, and now that I was being a girl and being myself and being _better_ that was something that had to change.

It wasn’t even that boyish. Still not curvy though, still too pale and still not civilian or curly haired with freckles.

Still flat chested.

“Yeah, well,” I said, scowling at it. “You’re Uchiha, what do you expect. You’re not going to look soft and round and tanned, you’re going to look like -” I bit the sentence off, closing my eyes and pressing my palms against them and reminding myself that I was meant to be _good_ , damnit. Not getting mad at myself. Progress. I was making _progress._

It didn’t feel like it. Why didn’t it feel like it. Why was it so damn difficult to feel like you belonged in your own skin. I was fucking - preteens weren’t meant to, to be buxom or whatever ridiculous standard I was setting for myself. Even the word sounded stupid. There were loads of shapes that girls could be, it didn’t make them any less girl if they weren’t a perfect hourglass, and allowing myself to get worked up about it was pointless and painful and going nowhere. I was a girl. Naruto and Sakura agreed with me. It was _fine._

“You’re going to look like mum,” I repeated, and when I opened my eyes again, I didn’t try to compare my reflection to the way I’d looked before. I fixed the image of my mum from her genin team photo in my mind instead, and tried to see her in the shape of my eyes, the high cheekbones, even the longer bits of hair hanging down either side of my face.

I paused, thrown by the similarities. If I didn’t look at my reflection as me, but instead looked at it as someone else who looked like a younger Mikoto...

I’d looked like her before, I remembered. Not on purpose. I’d tried to grow my hair out to look like Itachi, but it hadn’t worked. I’d just ended up looking like my mum, and at the time, I hadn’t wanted to think about her. She was a reminder that the world was shit and Itachi had killed everyone and I was alone, and I’d taken a kunai to it in a fit of anger and learnt that there was nothing intentional about canon Sasuke's signature hairstyle; it was just how hair went when you gathered it behind your head and sliced. Except, my hair wasn’t short enough to spike up at the back just now. And my mum wasn’t a painful reminder anymore.

I shook myself, putting the thoughts aside. Itachi didn’t kill the clan, the Hokage did. I was getting off topic. I’d come in here for a reason, and that was that Sakura and Naruto both knew I was a girl, and also that for the first time I was trying to look at the things that were wrong with me and make them better instead of pretending they didn’t exist, and the upshot of that was that I was going to wear the damn hakama I’d accidentally bought or die trying and it was going to be good or so help me I’d set it on fire.

I grappled one-handed with the ties for longer than I cared to admit before glowering at them and giving up in disgust.

“Look, fucker,” I told it through gritted teeth. “I am having a _moment_ here. Do you even know how hard I’m trying with this, I don’t like how I look enough that I don’t even let Plushie-tan see me without a top on. And now I’m trying to accept myself and you need a fecking master’s degree in trigonometry before you’ll deign to stay in one place and _don’t you dare come undone_ \- oh you pissing whore.”

Fire would be too good for it. Also I only had one pair and I wanted to wear it.

I hesitated, then thought, fuck it. I was a girl, wasn’t I? Besides, I was clothed, just not done up, what was the problem.

“Sakura? Could I borrow a hand?”

“Sure,” she replied, a beat too fast, and I heard her steps approaching the door. “Yes, of course. What do you need?”

I opened it just enough for her to step through, then gestured at the waistband I was currently holding up with chakra. “I can’t, um. They have to cross round and go together at the front, it doesn’t work with one hand.”

If she was surprised to see me in not only a far brighter colour than I’d ever worn before - stealing Naruto’s jacket notwithstanding - but also in a very different outfit, she didn’t let it show, just nodded and took the ties from me to knot in place.

“It’s pretty,” she said, with her head still bent down and focussed on them. “It suits you.”

I blinked. “Thank you,” I said. “It, um, it’s meant to be worn with all these layers and big sleeves. I don’t have that. I just have clothes. As in, normal clothes.” Even when she finished and stepped back, Sakura was hovering on the edge of avoiding my gaze, and she held herself in the awkwardly tense-not-tense way of someone who felt out of place and didn’t know how to fix it.

I bit my lip, then blurted, “Do _you_ want a hand?”

She looked up at me in confusion. “With what?”

“The keeping people alive. Thing. And the decisions and being responsible and.” I waved a vague gesture at the air. “Things. I know you’re better at planning, and I know -” I almost stumbled over the words, but didn’t “- I know I panic and I know I’m better at doing than at thinking, but.” I lifted a shoulder in a jerky half-shrug. “I’m people. Keeping people alive sounds like the sort of thing I should be invested in.”

She hiccoughed out a beat of laughter. “The keeping people alive thing,” she repeated with a smile, then her face turned serious again. “Naruto said you talked to him.”

“I - yeah. Kind of. I said words.”

“I’m glad. And I’m - I’m sorry.” I made an instinctive noise of protest, but she lifted her chin determinedly. “I’m _sorry,_ ” she insisted. “I don’t think of you like Tsuki but I didn’t… I wasn’t appreciating the things you actually can do and that a lot of things were out of your control.”

“They’re out of your control too,” I said. “You’re team leader and you have chainsaws on your arms, but we’re _twelve._ We’re not even teenagers yet. We should be doing d-ranks and being idiots. Preferably in ways that don’t kill us if they go wrong.”

“I’m thirteen,” she said dryly, raising an eyebrow. “Does that mean I’m exempt from d-ranks? Because if so, I’m playing that card next time Kakashi gives us a cleanup mission.”

I blinked. “You’re not thirteen. When were you thirteen? I was meant to get you balloons. Why didn’t you say?”

“Don’t worry about it, Sasuke-chan. It was before we left the academy.”

That was nowhere near as comforting as it was probably meant to be, because, “You’ve been thirteen the _whole time?_ ”

She grinned. “That’s how it works. Did you want to show me the plants?”

“But _how_ is it how it works, I can’t be younger than - is Naruto still twelve? He has to still be twelve. He is still twelve, I have the photo and my mum was more pregnant than his. Naruto, we’re looking at plants, come join. Did _you_ know Sakura was older than us?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sasuke at the start of the fic: Fuck the fish. Live in water? Disgusting. Die if they're left to fend for themselves? _Disgusting._ Had to be rescued from abandoned gardens in a bucket and now rely on an idiot who hates them for everything, who does that.
> 
> Sasuke at the turning point of the fic: You're still small and helpless and that's kind of shit, but you also didn't ask to be stuck in a garden pond where you need someone to feed you every day. So. Maybe.
> 
> Sasuke at the current point of the fic: Well obviously someone needs to look after the fish. They're fish. How the fuck would they look after themselves, are they meant to clean the filter by blowing bubbles at it? Honestly.
> 
> (the Koi Watch team on discord: Sasuke's going to leave the fish with Sakura if she vamooses, write that down)
> 
> Also! Just a quick note to say thank you so much for all the comments, they absolutely make my day and I wish I was still able to answer everyone individually. But I definitely do love to read them and the fact that you keep reading is the reason I keep writing, so <3 and keep on being fabulous x


	32. Chapter 32

We didn’t run into Jiraiya until the day after, and even then I couldn’t tell if he meant to meet us or not. Charitably, I excused his lateness as a matter of priority - if Shino had got a seal as I thought he had, then even with Anko to keep an eye on it they’d need Jiraiya to see to his before dealing with mine. As frustrating as my arm was it wasn’t scrambling my head or causing me active pain, and Kakashi had deemed it stable enough, so. Shino’s was probably more urgent.

Uncharitably I thought it was perfectly on brand for Jiraiya to dither at the bathhouse instead of facing his responsibilities as Konoha’s seal master and decided to dislike him on principle. I mean. Responsibilities as seal master, responsibilities as godfather… And either he was a shit spymaster who’d spent the last decade not noticing ROOT running rings around him or he knew full well what Danzo was up to and had decided to turn a blind eye. I was _glad_ he’d split on Naruto. Who knew what the man would do with a baby? Take his eye off it in an onsen and drown it, probably.

So, revising previous statement. Charitably, I decided to restrict myself to just disliking him on principle, because I was magnanimous and forgiving like that. Plus, the extra day of downtime was something a relief after the madness of the exam - we'd turned up at our usual training ground at the usual time but Kakashi had not, and I deliberately pushed aside the unease that came with his absence.

Pakkun said he was running patrols. Therefore he was running patrols. The fact that he was one of the village's deadliest assets and that Konoha was preparing for war was entirely coincidential; his ANBU days were bad for him, he wasn't going back. He'd probably just made himself nocturnal - so many ninja casually out and about was a not insignificant defense during the day, and so long as we didn't venture too far from the village or follow a hooded stranger down a dark side alley we should, in theory, be safe. It was the night we needed to be wary of, and it made sense for that to be when Kakashi was more on guard, so the fact that he’d disappeared and left us with Pakkun was all part of his master plan and it was _fine_.

Wondering if he was being sent on preemptive strikes to Sound was irrational. Wondering if he didn't trust the village's security and had decided to step up his own was irrational. Wondering if the village was so concerned with appearing strong and unruffled that _they_ hadn't stepped up security after losing one clan heir and nearly losing another was _also_ irrational, and stupid to boot, and trying to second guess what the Hokage may or may not be doing about the whole war situation was nearly impossible with the lack of information we had.

“But surely it makes more sense to send a rescue mission?” Naruto asked, leaning his elbows on the railings of the training ground bridge. “If we declare war then Sound will declare war back, then everyone’s just fighting each other. It doesn’t help Hinata.”

“It could be a distraction?” Sakura offered. “We don’t know how well defended she is, maybe we need to split Sound’s forces before the rescue teams can sneak in.”

I made a noise of disagreement. “It’s not about Hinata. That would work if this was a standard mission against an enemy camp, but war’s different.”

“Of course it’s about Hinata, what else would it be?”

“Pride?” I shrugged, and kicked my feet out from where they dangled over the edge to watch the way the baggy material of the hakama billowed around my legs. “Konoha threatens Sound with war to make them give Hinata back, but if Orochimaru calls their bluff then they look weak if they don’t follow through.”

“We haven’t threatened though,” Sakura said. “Not publicly. Everything’s classified - we don’t even know if there’s been an official statement.”

“Ok, fine. Konoha let an enemy kage take a clan heir. They look weak if they just ignore it and don’t do anything about it.”

“Except we are doing something about it,” Naruto insisted. “We’re trying to get Hinata back.” He turned to me with a frown, deliberating over the next thing he wanted to say. From the slight shake to his head though he decided against it, and went for something else. “If it’s about showing we’re strong, then the way to be strong is to protect people, and the way to show the other villages they can’t kidnap people is to not give up until Hinata’s safe again.”

If she was even still alive to be rescued, but I didn’t say that. I knew that Orochimaru wouldn’t be cowed - he’d never have taken her to begin with if he could be. Unless he’d never planned to and had just been amused at her attempt to threaten him, but even then he didn’t seem the sort to back down. I didn’t really understand what he _was_ the sort to do given that neither the byakugan nor the kikachu bugs matched up with what I knew of his immortality plans, but the only way I could see for Konoha to avoid war was for Orochimaru to plan something worse.

I grimaced at the thought. There had to be other ways. War was a shit answer, I refused to let myself fall into the trap of thinking it was necessary. We were ninja, we thrived on sneaky and unconventional solutions - the fact that shinobi defaulted so often to hitting each other on battlefields was a travesty of wasted intelligence. If I was thinking like the village, and I were trying to avoid losing face _without_ sending teams of people to die for no reason, I’d…

My stomach turned.

I’d declare her a missing nin and a traitor, and quietly send ROOT to assassinate her and reclaim her eyes. Missing nin were a fact of life. No one batted an eye at them, and as the failed heir of an unyielding clan, she was exactly the sort of person people would accept as going rogue. It was only weakness on Konoha’s part if they allowed another village to one-up them. If you defected by yourself then you were just a troubled prodigy child with a grudge, it’s not like you were anything special.

It’s not like assassination was a much better answer than war, either. I guess less people died.

“Yeah,” I said, swallowing that line of logic and breaking the unhappy silence that had settled over us. Sakura hadn’t contradicted Naruto, but she hadn’t agreed with him either, and I could see from her face that she didn’t think it was that simple even if she wanted it to be.

I scowled, looking back over the river. Why wasn’t it that simple. Don’t go to war, idiots, how hard was that. “Yeah,” I repeated, stronger. “You’re right. And even if that’s not what happens, that doesn’t _stop_ it being right.” I pushed off from the railings to land on the surface of the water, suddenly restless. “I need more shuriken. Do you need more shuriken? We should buy shuriken.”

“I could do with restocking,” Sakura admitted, going with the subject change. “I need to be in town anyway, my dad wanted to do something to celebrate passing the preliminaries.” She flicked a grin at us. “I’d ask if you wanted to come, but I like you too much to inflict his particular brand of girl’s day out on you like that.”

“The bastard can do girl’s day out,” Naruto protested.

Sakura raised an eyebrow. “Crying,” she warned. “Emotions. Lots of them. Also probably glitter.”

“Sorry,” I said, suppressing a shudder. “I suddenly remembered a dentist appointment. Maybe another day.”

I spent the night at Naruto’s again, this time with Urushi and Akino to keep guard while Pakkun went to check in with Kakashi. Bull as well - I don’t know if he’d spent the whole day back at the flat or if he’d been elsewhere, but he lifted his head from his paws and gave a heavy thump of his tail in welcome when we got back. Like the previous night he stayed in the living room, the only room really with enough space for him to stretch out in. Akino took what looked like a strictly timed patrol, sitting on alert by the window and prowling to check the door and other rooms at regular intervals, and Urushi took the foot of the bed and settled into a watchful doze.

He’d snuffled hopefully at dinner. I hadn’t fed him any, because I wasn’t quite willing to blatantly go against Pakkun’s orders, but if I’d been that tiny bit kack-handed when boxing up the leftovers and some had spilled over and ended up in reach… I mean. I had a bad arm, you couldn’t expect me to be perfect all the time.

Pakkun swapped with Akino some time during the night, and though he still didn’t have any update for us on Kakashi, he did lead us back to our training ground at the usual time in the morning for practice and spars. The practices he set us to doing were familiar from when he'd been left in charge of us in Wave, right down to the break for a game of fetch - the only change he made was to adapt the exercises for me to take my arm into account.

Try and adapt. The three of us shared a glance; as much as we appreciated him, designing training exercises wasn’t his strong suit. In fact, I was pretty sure these ones weren’t just similar to the ones Kakashi had set out for us in Wave, they were _exactly_ the ones Kakashi had set out for us in Wave, and the problems they’d been meant to help us with just weren’t problems anymore. In theory reviewing the basics was always helpful, but in reality…

Well, at least it wasn’t a long term solution, which hopefully meant that Kakashi would be coming back soon.

Late morning we were set to a light jog around the village, following Pakkun to set the pace. The slow pace. The dawdling, snails-are-disappearing-over-the-horizon pace. In the race of the tortoise and the hare, we were the paint on the starting line. My rib had only been a little cracked, and even that had mostly healed, but I didn’t think Pakkun had even known about it so he couldn’t have been forcing everyone to crawl on my behalf.

Urushi was _trotting._

The only upside of the whole experience was that the route took us past the onsen, and, more importantly, past the white-haired lech just outside the onsen, bent double to peer through his spyhole and giggling like a perverted hyena.

Jiraiya, you fuckwit. I only have one _arm._ You were meant to deal with it two days ago, you mouldy cheese.

“Shannaro?” I muttered to Sakura, slowing out of my jog and shooting Jiraiya a dirty glare. She wouldn't know it was for his lateness in seal fixing, but I would, and in all honesty the giggle and the spying was reason enough for him to be flattened.

“Shannaro,” she agreed with a flat look of disgust. “One moment, Pakkun.” He obligingly halted for her, hanging back expectantly enough that I shot him a curious look. I shook it off though and turned back to Sakura; she’d _said_ shannaro but she’d decided against a full on charge and Naruto and I fell in step behind her as she stalked up to the onsen.

“Oho,” Jiraiya greeted - god, did people actually say that outside books? - “What’s this? A fan? A beautiful young flower, taken in by the visage of greatness -”

“Are you aware that those are the kunoichi baths?” she said, cutting across him with a combative glave.

“Am I aware?” he repeated, puffing himself up. “Why do you think I'm _here?_ The question is, are _you_ aware of who’s outside the kunoichi baths,” he started pushing his sleeves up and flexing his fingers overdramatically for a jutsu, and despite his almost comical act all three of us stepped back in alarm, “and what invaluable information I might be gathering there, I, Jiraiya of the Sannin -” he finished his last hand seal with a flourish and slammed his palm down on the ground “- the Great Toad Sage!”

The toad that appeared was easily as large as a building, dwarfing over the fence to the onsen. It flicked its eyes down to us as soon as it appeared, cheeks already bulging, and spat what I assume was a bullet of toad oil directly at Sakura. She dodged - we all dodged, scrambling to a safer distance, and it was only that the Sannin were so well known as heroes and the fact that the oil bullet wasn’t followed up with another attack that stopped us responding.

We dropped into a defensive formation anyway, Urushi and Akino flanking us either side. Pakkun just rolled his eyes and lay down on the path.

“What,” I said, staring wide eyed, “the fuck.”

Jiraiya grinned in a way that was probably meant to be roguish and put his hands on his hips. “And that’s just one of my awesome techniques! I’d show you more, but I have important research to do - far too important for three measly gennin to interrupt!” He held the pose for another second, then nodded in satisfaction and dismissed his toad. If it was at all insulted by being summoned to flex on a trio of genin and their dogs, it didn’t show it, and once the smoke dispersed Jiraiya went straight back to his perving with a demented muttering.

Collectively, we blinked.

“Did he have a genjutsu running?” Sakura asked. “I can’t believe no one from the onsen heard that.”

“Um.” I shook my head and tried to refocus. “If he did, it wasn’t aimed at us.” I relied almost exclusively on visual cues and inconsistencies to detect genjutsu and henges, which was great on the one hand as very few ninja were good enough that I didn’t spot them, but didn’t help much if I couldn’t see the genjutsu I was meant to be detecting. “Probably, though. Unless he really was that caught up in impressing us, but like you said, someone would have heard.”

“He’s perving on a bathhouse,” Sakura pointed out neutrally. “That’s not a great first impression.” She’d backed down from her earlier outrage to something much more cautious, and I frowned at her for it. She obviously recognised his name, and somehow I suspected the stories she’d heard emphasised the heroics of the sannin - the loyal sannin, at least - rather than the sleaziness, but come on. Seriously?

“Not to us,” I allowed, “But he’s obviously trying to catch our interest and if you were an idiot trying to look good in front of a teenage boy then you might think it was funny. If you had, say, the brain of a lobotomised squid.”

“Yeah, well, you’re a girl,” Naruto said, and I looked at him in surprise. “And even if you weren’t a girl you wouldn’t find it funny.” I didn’t have time to correct him that it was _his_ interest that Jiraiya was trying to catch, because he’d already settled into an indignant scowl and was marching up to confront him.

It was kind of pathetic, really, how visibly Jiraiya perked up as soon as he approached. The whole thing was kind of pathetic. Who was dramatic enough to announce their entrance like they were introducing a character in a pantomime? What meagre hopes I had for Icha Icha being well written were plummeting fast. If he cared that much about Naruto liking him, he should’ve been there when Naruto was tiny and actually needed him. Or, you know, introduced himself _honestly_ instead of barking out a laugh, summoning yet another ridiculously oversized toad - if we weren’t allowed Bull out in the village then he _really_ wasn’t allowed Gama-whichever and I called bullshit on the double standards - and hopping away with a challenge thrown over his shoulder for us to catch him if we wanted him to teach us.

I pouted in Sakura’s direction. She shrugged somewhat helplessly. “If he actually wants to teach us,” she said, and though she didn’t explicitly gesture at Pakkun or reference the somewhat lacklustre morning we’d had I knew she was thinking it. Pakkun was great. Almost better than Kakashi at corralling puppies and laying down the law, but what he wasn’t was a ninja and there was only so far his taijutsu skills could take us.

What he also wasn’t was in any way bothered by how things were turning out and I fought the urge to scowl suspiciously at him and blame him for setting the whole thing up.

“That’s exactly what he _wants_ you to think,” I told Sakura instead. “Don’t give in to his manipulation like this. You’re better than that.”

“Maybe, but I have an exam to pass,” she said dryly, and started jogging towards where Naruto was waiting impatiently for us.

I switched my pout to Pakkun. He blinked back at me with guileless innocence and followed after the other two, and I grit my teeth and admitted an unwilling defeat.

“C’mon, Urushi. Apparently we’re playing fetch.”

It took. Too long. Far, _far_ too long to finally pin Jiraiya down. Whatever else you had to say about him, he was tricky, and we weren’t exactly tracking specialists. If we had more of the pack maybe, but Pakkun was refusing to help in a way that suggested this was a test and Akino preferred to keep a strict distance and circle whichever perimeter he’d decided on, a task that kept him too occupied to stray into helping us hunt.

Urushi though was being his usual quiet self and following pretty closely at my heels. He’d track enough to point us the right way, but he didn’t like venturing too far from us, and given that Jiraiya’s scent trail was sporadic and froggy from riding his toad it didn’t give him a huge amount to go on.

“Tsuki?” Naruto asked, practically growling with frustration as we hit another deadend. Sakura pulled a face.

“Tsuki,” she agreed, already running through the hand seals. Given that the previous deadend had been a restaurant where Jiraiya had apparently told them we’d be paying the bill, she was pissed. Naruto was pissed. We were all pissed. I’d paid it, because the poor waitress looked mortified and it wasn’t her fault, but my interest rates were higher than a yakuza loan and if Jiraiya couldn’t afford them I’d happily take his left kidney as collateral.

“Tsuki is here!” Tsuki announced, diving into a one-shoulder roll as soon as she appeared and coming up crouched in front of Sakura’s ankles. “Where are the enemies? Who are the enemies? Did they already run? Run, cowards, run!”

“Oh, they ran alright,” Sakura told her grimly. “We’re tracking an old man who summons toads, Tsuki-chan. If Urushi shows you where we last had his trail can you help us find him?”

Her attention shifted to Urushi, and he took a couple of steps forwards and wagged his tail in greeting.

She sneezed at him.

“You smell of person,” she accused, then wagged her own tail back and danced round him in hello. “Where’s the trail? Tsuki can find the coward man.”

“Coward man,” I repeated, unable to stop myself grinning. It probably wasn’t fair to him and his reasons for abandoning Naruto were probably more complicated than that, but honestly? Everyone had a tragic backstory. We were _ninjas._ Jiraiya needed to grow the fuck up and until he did, he was the coward man, and no one could convince me otherwise. “You have the best names for people, Tsuki.”

“Of course I do,” she said. “I’m the best.”

Still though: even with Tsuki haring off in every direction and only pausing to snap playfully at Akino’s tail, it was mid afternoon before we managed to corner Jiraiya. He’d ditched whichever Gama variant he’d summoned and was lying on the ground at the edge of the forest, his scroll propped up against a nearby fallen log and his entire demeanor suggesting a lazy lack of concern for any of the world’s problems.

We landed in front of him, making no effort to be quiet, and scowled when he didn’t even look at us.

“Coward man,” Tsuki announced, looking up at Sakura proudly. “Are you going to fight him? Should I hide again?”

He spluttered his way to an indignant sitting position. “ _Coward_ man? Were none of you listening to my introduction earlier? I am the great -”

“Pervy-coward-sage,” Naruto finished for him, crossing his arms. “We found you. Now train us.”

“Pushy,” Jiraiya accused. “What makes you think I want to train you anyway?”

I barely refrained from rolling my eyes. “Oh please,” I mumbled to myself. Even without knowing his connection to Naruto he was completely see through; the setup at the onsen, the trail of breadcrumbs just easy enough for us to follow but hard enough to qualify as a challenge - I might not think much of him, but the man _was_ Konoha’s spymaster. If he wanted to lose three genin and a puppy then he’d’ve lost us, I wasn’t kidding myself about that - the way his body language was angled directly towards us even as he pretended to be huffy and turn away. He wasn’t fooling anyone.

Apparently though he also wasn’t as focussed on Naruto as I’d thought, and he narrowed in on my statement with an intensity that was entirely uncalled for.

“So!” he declared, gesturing so expansively at me that Urushi’s hackles raised in warning. “You think you’re such a catch that anyone would want to train you, is that it? I can see it now -” he moved his hands until his forefingers and thumbs were forming a rectangle and closed one eye to look through it, as though framing me for a photo “- the clan heir, arrogant and dismissive but beneath all his brooding is a lonely heart just waiting to be melted; the plucky underdog -” he shifted his frame to Naruto “- who never gives up and never lets life get him down, an inspiration to all who know him; and caught between them -” now to Sakura, and he faltered a bit at her unimpressed _everything_ but rallied well enough to finish his spiel “- the beautiful princess, caring and sweet, her heart torn between the two teammates vying for her affection -”

“No,” Sakura interrupted flatly.

“So afraid of losing them that she’d rather deny her love and chose neither -”

“Absolutely not.”

“Puppy’s not an underdog,” Tsuki added helpfully. “He’s a fox. Sakura-bitch is a dog, but she’s top bitch, not under bitch. And Kitten’s not lonely, he’s got pack.”

“She’s got pack,” Sakura corrected with an apologetic glance at me, but I waved her off. There hadn’t exactly been time to fill Tsuki in on the change.

“She’s got pack,” Tsuki repeated without missing a beat, then paused and wrinkled her nose. “Wait. If Kitten’s going to be a queen when she grows up, does that make her a princess now?”

I choked. So did Jiraiya, and I hurriedly un-choked because I didn’t want to have anything in common with him, but _seriously?_ How the frick did Tsuki know that female cats were called queens. She didn’t even know that baby foxes were _kits_ , this was an unfair distribution of knowledge. And, from the way her tongue lolled out in a self-satisfied doggy laugh, she was teasing on purpose and no matter how small and fluffy she was she was going to _get_ it next time we trained together.

“Other than that,” Naruto said, bringing the focus back to him and giving Jiraiya an annoyed version of Iruka’s disappointed stare, “you got just about everything wrong.”

“Just about?” Jiraiya repeated weakly, taken aback.

“Sakura’s beautiful. Everything else, no.”

“And caring and sweet, I said she was caring and sweet - listen, you can’t imply a lady’s not sweet, they hate that -”

“I’m not a lady,” Sakura said. “I’m top bitch. I also punch people in the face with chainsaws.” She smiled, a too-sharp thin lipped smile that conveyed a lot of threat and very little care or sweetness. “Sasuke-chan thinks you set up your entrance on purpose to make yourself look good. Did you?”

He spluttered, half-turned to Naruto, then clearly thought better of it and changed tacks. “Sasuke- _chan_ , is it? A princess kitten, now that’s -”

“- a shit way to try and regain control of the conversation,” I finished for him. “Also liable to make Naruto hate you. Reconsider.”

Alas, he did not. “Never fear, Sasuke-chan!” he declared, favouring the three of us with a beaming grin. “A double kunoichi team, such a rarity must be nurtured - cherished!”

“You aren’t Sakura, you aren’t allowed to call me Sasuke-chan.”

“Naruto, my boy, there’s so much to teach you - and your darling teammates of course - but I have so many things to tell you about dealing with himes -”

“You aren’t _Naruto_ , you aren’t allowed to call me hime.”

He paused at that, squinting between me and Naruto. I lifted my chin and glared back, and Naruto nodded in stern agreement, staring Jiraiya down in a way that left no room for argument.

“Huh,” he said. “I could make a book of this.”

“Try it and die, coward man,” Sakura said pleasantly, and Naruto let a fang show at the edge of his grin.

Coward man. Tsuki, your sins were forgiven. Jiraiya, the great toad sage, the last remaining loyal sannin even if he spent more time out of Konoha than in it, forever known as the coward man because a ploy to catch his godson’s interest backfired on him. Was Tsuki as clueless as she pretended to be about names, was she actually a little shit who was doing it on purpose - don’t know, don’t care, Tsuki got gold stars and a free pass from me.

_Coward man._

“You’re not serious,” I said, staring at them. Sakura shifted guiltily in her seat, but neither of them denied it. “You _are._ You’re - with _Jiraiya?_ ”

“We need a teacher,” she said, pushing the noodles round her ramen instead of eating it. “Whatever else he is, he’s competent.”

“We _have_ a teacher.”

“We need a teacher that’s here,” she amended. “Pakkun agrees.”

“Pakkun doesn’t,” I huffed. “Pakkun’s just pretending to be ok with Jiraiya to stop Tsuki trying to attack him for not being pack. Which, by the way, _why_ are we stopping Tsuki trying to attack him. It’s hilarious.”

“Tsuki can attack anyone,” Tsuki chimed in from her position on the floor. “Kitten, we should scout his weaknesses so Sakura-bitch and Puppy can kill him.”

“No,” Sakura said, again, and Tsuki yawned and stretched back out in an obedient sprawl. But the sort of obedient sprawl that said if Sakura changed her mind she’d be there, just let her know, she had teeth and she was good at hiding in bushes when she was told, she could totally take the coward man if we wanted her to.

I turned back to my bowl with a less obedient scowl. We hadn’t been able to go to Ichiraku for dinner yesterday because Sakura was with her dad, or the day before that because she’d been in hospital, so technically this was our celebration for surviving the second stage of the exam. Too much really had happened since then for it to feel like it, and the topic of conversation was revolving squarely around whether we should accept Jiraiya as interim sensei or not.

Sakura was in favour. After the run around he’d given us earlier, Jiraiya had actually settled and seemed to take his assumed role seriously, putting Naruto and Sakura to sparring with each other so he could get a feel for their abilities while he checked over my seal. He had some suggestions for how she could augment her punches that sounded cribbed off Tsunade, and ideas for seal adjustments on her gloves that had made even me perk up at the possibilities.

“You’ve the control for it,” he’d said, almost offhandedly. “Course, there’s more than just _control_ to being a true seal master. You need panache. Flair! A creative mind, the ability to think in concentric spirals and leave behind the petty constraints of reality. Anyone with decent control can copy out storage scrolls but _mastery?_ It’s an art, and unless you have the spark then all my genius would be wasted on you.”

All his genius. Right. Because his genius involved trying to rework someone else’s strength techniques and force Sakura into the same mold instead of looking at what Sakura actually did for herself. From what Jiraiya described, Tsunade’s strength sounded heavily chakra based; it relied on focussing the full force of a punch down to a precisely controlled chakra barrier that pulsed out from the knuckles just before impact. The combination of the added speed from the pulse and the change in texture from somewhat-malleable fist to incompressible chakra was what gave the punch the inhuman force needed to shatter mountains, and if that _was_ how Tsunade’s strength worked then it was no wonder it needed perfect control to pull it off.

Sakura didn’t fight like that. She put her chakra into her muscles rather than in a layer over her skin; it was both more instinctive and more versatile than using a chakra barrier, even though in theory it was more limited by how much force her muscles could withstand before blowing apart. In _theory_. In reality Kakashi had been working on building up her entire body strength to a level where that didn’t happen, and really, how often did you need to shatter a mountain anyway.

Still though. Sakura was in favour. She was considering seals with a dogged determination and she didn’t seem to mind that Jiraiya’s instructions for chakra-strength were somewhat patchy. The fact that he was a sannin seemed to outweigh the fact that he was a pervy coward man in her books.

“We don’t have to like him to benefit from what he can teach us,” she pressed when I made no move to give in.

“That’s not the point,” I muttered, turning to my other side where Naruto had been quiet up till then. “He’s flaky and unreliable and it doesn’t matter if he’s good at teaching. He’s not our sensei.”

Naruto shrugged. “We won’t rely on him,” he said easily, and I made a brief noise of triumph. “He’s just teaching us, that doesn’t make him team.”

The triumph died. “No he's not. Kakashi’s teaching us,” I insisted. “Because Kakashi’s our sensei. We’re _Kakashi’s kids._ ”

“Kakashi’s not here.”

“Ok, so he’s not teaching us right now, but that doesn’t change anything.” I ran an agitated hand through my hair - still my only working one; Jiraiya had frowned down at my seal and tried a couple of things that resulted in him explaining absolutely nothing and saying he’d look at it again in the morning for me. “He’s busy. We’re not abandoning him for being busy, that’s bullshit.”

“We’re not abandoning him,” Sakura said. “We’re just working to a time limit with the exams and everything, and we don’t know how long he’ll be busy for.”

And everything. The war. Did she really think we needed Jiraiya for protection, was that the problem? Kakashi wouldn’t leave us vulnerable. We had the dogs, he was keeping an eye on us, it was fine.

“If it’s not abandoning then it’s insubordination,” I tried, switching to a different tack. “Who just swaps their teacher out for a different one?”

“People whose teachers don’t teach them?” Naruto offered, and I glared at him.

“It’s not that uncommon,” Sakura said. “I mean, not usually for genin, but teams switch up a lot when they start nearing chunin.”

I shifted my glare to her, but she didn’t back down, just met my stare with stubborn practicality. If she wasn’t talking about leaving Kakashi, her practicality would make more sense. Jounin _did_ get pulled to missions sometimes, and finding temporary teachers - or working with other teams’ senseis as we’d done with Asuma in the past - was a logical solution and a way to build on Konoha’s legendary teamwork. Plus, she was right that the exams put more pressure on her and Naruto to get stronger quicker, and we’d already agreed that Pakkun wasn’t the best at bipedal taijutsu.

But she was talking about leaving Kakashi. Therefore her practicality didn’t count.

“Fine,” I said. “You and Naruto make chunin and go with Jiraiya. I’ll stay with Kakashi.”

“We’re not splitting up,” Naruto countered immediately, shifting in his seat to face us more fully.

“Then we’ll all stay with Kakashi. Because that’s what teams _do._ ”

He frowned, and I was aware that I sounded like a broken record, but I genuinely didn’t get how they could propose something so blatantly _wrong_ and not see it. On the edge of my peripheral vision I could see Tsuki shifting agitatedly at Sakura’s feet and glancing at the other dogs to check everything was still ok, but I didn’t look for their reactions because Naruto was speaking again.

“Kakashi’s not team,” he said, and my mind blanked.

“What.”

“That’s a bit harsh,” Sakura said, and I didn’t turn to look at her either but I could hear in her voice that she didn’t fully disagree with him.

“ _What._ ”

Naruto lifted his chin, brows lowering. He still looked calm, no trace of anger or bitterness, but he also looked certain, and I didn’t understand. “He’s not,” he said. “Not like you and Sakura-chan are.”

“In what universe does that make sense,” I asked. “He’s our sensei. Without him there wouldn’t _be_ a team. Team seven is Team Kakashi by definition how the fuck -”

“That’s not what I mean,” he interrupted. “He’s our sensei and we’re on a team with him, but just because he’s _on_ the team doesn’t _make_ him team. As in, pack team. You know what I mean.” He shook his head, annoyed at the words not lining up the way he wanted them to. “You don’t rely on someone just because they’re a teacher and you’re meant to,” he amended, starting again. “You rely on someone because you trust them.”

“And you don’t trust Kakashi,” I finished for him. “But you’re willing to trust _Jiraiya?_ ”

“I’m willing to learn from Jiraiya because we need to be stronger and he can help us. I never said he’d be team either.” He grinned, turning back to his ramen as though he’d solved everything. “We’re bananas, aren’t we? We three stick together, that’s all that matters.”

I opened my mouth. Closed it. Opened it again then growled in frustration and closed it. “I am not abandoning Kakashi,” I finally said, ignoring Tsuki’s quiet aside of _what’s bananas?_ to Urushi.

“No one’s asking you to,” Sakura promised. “We’re just doing some other training while he’s busy, that’s all.”

Yeah, and apparently not considering him team enough to be a banana while we were at it. I tried to think back to see if I could find a reason for Naruto's lack of trust, but the only thing I could think of was that being betrayed by Mizuki before he’d graduated had fucked up his world view. Kakashi wasn’t the best teacher but he was _Kakashi._ He’d do anything for us because we were his kids, and if we just turned around and left him because his anything wasn’t good enough? No. You didn’t do that. That’s not how it worked.

I looked down at the dogs instead of answering, glancing over Tsuki’s confused concern and landing on Pakkun instead. It was almost a surprise to realise that he was still there and I felt suddenly guilty for thinking earlier that he’d set up the meeting at the onsen. He’d been quiet since, happy to step back as Sakura led the chase to track Jiraiya down and Jiraiya led the training session for the afternoon, and he’d not said a word during the whole discussion about leaving Kakashi behind. I almost wanted to ask him why he hadn’t spoken up except that it was probably awkward as hell for him to even consider intervening. What could he say? What would he say to _Kakashi_?

He looked up at me, holding my gaze for a long second, then whuffed and turned away.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Tsuki: Not-pack? Kill it  
> Sakura: _No_  
>  Sasuke: Wait, she might have a point


	33. Chapter 33

Despite my misgivings, we met up with Jiraiya again the following day. I was honestly surprised to see him and grudgingly gave him props for making the effort. Not that he did a huge amount with his effort; the training exercise he’d decided on allowed him to lean back on his elbows and relax while Sakura used chakra to pelt Naruto with water balloons. Naruto had a single senbon, a supposedly important scroll rolled out on the ground that wasn’t allowed to get wet, and an instruction not to touch the balloon with any part of his body or clothing. In theory he was training his control by using the senbon to deflect the balloons away without breaking them; in reality he was getting soaked.

“Are you _trying_ to wind him up?” I asked as the latest balloon burst in a shower of purple ink that clashed horribly with his hair.

“Maybe I am,” Jiraiya answered, grinning broadly as he watched. “What’s the point of life if you can’t have a little fun with it?”

I shot him a disbelieving look. “This isn’t a game. Maybe you don’t care about him, but -”

“Oi oi, who said I didn’t care?” He affected a wounded expression, going so far as to lift a hand to his chest in mockery of an aching heart. “Guys don’t show their love with flowers and kisses, you know. There’s a subtlety to it. The contrast between a rough exterior and a heart of gold, that’s the sweet spot.”

“That’s an excuse for an abusive relationship,” I said flatly. “You’ve known him for a day. You don’t care.” Alternatively: you’ve known him all his life and not bothered to show up, you still don’t care. “Why are you even here if you’re not going to train them properly?”

He raised an eyebrow, switching his amused grin to me. “Easy, little hime,” he said, ignoring my annoyed look at the nickname. “There’s more to growing up than just getting stronger all the time. Maybe I am training them properly, maybe I’m not, not everything’s straight forward enough to tell.”

I scowled. The fuck did people have against straight forward. Straight forward was _good._ Save the twisty ninja plots for enemies, stop trying to use them to confuse your allies. Stupid.

“Aren’t you meant to be looking at my arm?” I asked, changing the subject. It was still in a sling, and I lifted it at the shoulder to watch how it flopped uselessly against my side. “I’m not getting _any_ training just sitting here.”

“You sure? Perhaps I’m passing on my wisdom and worldly experience, precious secrets that will teach you the true meaning of -”

“Coward man,” I interrupted impatiently, not caring how rude it was. “ _Arm._ ”

“Good things come to those who wait, you know.”

“Like death. Kakashi said you’d fix it.”

He tapped his chin. “Did he now? He has a lot of faith in me, it seems.”

I blinked against the sudden unease that brought. Jiraiya could fix it. Couldn’t he? All he needed to do was take the seal off, it wasn’t like he had any reason _not_ to help. He was a self centered pervert with no sense of urgency or responsibility, but he wasn’t an outright enemy.

“You know what the seal is?” he asked, turning back to me. I shook my head cautiously.

“It was meant to be applied to a jinchuriki, but I don’t know if it’s specifically to do with blocking a bijuu,” I said. “It makes me unable to feel my arm. Or run chakra through it. That’s all I know.”

“That’s about all there is to it, except that you were partially right about the bijuu connection.” He pushed himself to a sitting position and gestured, and I tugged the sling off and used my good hand to manoeuvre the arm over to him. Thankfully it was warm enough that I was in a sleeveless top with no arm protectors rather than my usual ensemble, and though it did very little to hide that I was hurt it made it easy for him to see what he was doing.

The sleeveless top was new. In theory, the shirt having a narrower silhouette at the shoulders and a looser one lower down should give me a slightly more feminine figure, which was still a stupid thing to be hung up about, but apparently still something I was hung up about, so. The shirt - and my mum’s flower pins, which I’d started wearing in my hair - were at least subtle enough that I didn’t feel nervous in them, and as ridiculous as it was to feel daunted by the hakama I was secretly relieved that it was too impractical to train in. I could handle it. Obviously I could handle it, it was just clothes. I just, also, was making a lot of changes, and some of them were a bit big, and maybe some days I didn’t want to.

But: arm. Seal. Jiraiya frowned as he held his hand over it, fingers splayed to match the five dots of the circle-shaped pattern. “It’s not a block,” he said. “If it was a block, it would form a solid line. These gaps, they mean that it’s a filter; it lets through the host’s chakra while the bijuu’s chakra is caught in the seal and trapped there.”

“I don’t have any bijuu chakra though,” I said, probably redundantly. “I’m pretty sure I would’ve noticed.”

“You don’t,” he confirmed. “You don’t have any chakra except for your own, I checked -” I suppressed a twitch at that. Not that I had anyone else’s chakra to hide, but if he’d been looking that closely then he’d’ve seen far more of my skill set and weaknesses than I wanted to advertise. Also, what the fuck, don’t look at people’s chakra like that without asking. A request to remove my seal is not blanket permission to nosy, go away. “- so there shouldn’t be anything for the seal to anchor itself to and filter out,” he finished, not mentioning my reaction.

“Cool,” I said shortly. “Fascinating. Can you be curious about it another time and just get rid of it for now, please.”

He hummed. It was a less than positive sign. “Not until I know why your chakra doesn’t recognise itself,” he finally said.

The unease came back, and I resolutely pushed it down and ignored it. “Ok. Um, how long will that take?”

He sat back, looking at me in a way that was not pitying or I’d set it on fire, but verged far too far into sympathetic to ever be comfortable. My skin crawled. “Some things can’t be rushed,” he said, which meant that he didn’t know and there was no point to my even being here. “Seals are dangerous at the best of -”

“I was born with fire chakra,” I blurted, “But shit happened and now it’s water. Would that do it.”

“It might,” he hedged, tilting his head and eyeing me curiously. I refused to explain any further. He probably didn’t need me to; people’s elemental natures didn’t exactly change because life went _well_ for them. “Then again, using fire and water as the base to unlock the seal might leave you permanently disabled.”

He didn’t know. He didn’t _know._ “Unlike the temporarily disabled I am now, you mean.” I took my arm back, rolling to my feet in agitation and not stopping to collect the sling from the floor. Naruto and Sakura were still practicing with water balloons; Naruto was gaudishly multicoloured and steaming slightly as he used his own fire to dry off. Kyuubi’s fire. Whichever. “Except if you’re not going to risk _doing_ anything then it may as well be permanent now. Thanks. Brilliant deduction, can see why you’re Konoha’s brightest and best.” He didn’t draw back at my insult and the sudden thought that he was humouring me, as though I was just lashing out at bad news and needed to be given space to come to terms with it - I couldn’t. Fucking - I scowled, fighting to get a grip on my temper. I wasn’t _doing_ that anymore. I was being better, damnit.

Maybe I did need space to come to terms with it.

“Ok,” I said as levelly as I could. “Ok. Fine. I’m going to -” I cast around, trying to find something useful I could do, but the idea of actually training one-handed felt too much like accepting that the seal was unfixable. I might have to, at some point, I knew that, and ignoring it in the hopes it would magically go away was beyond stupid, except just then I couldn’t do it.

Who would leave the village’s last sharingan with someone who couldn’t make hand seals?

“Ice cream,” I finished hollowly. “C’mon, Urushi. We’re going to get ice cream.”

Jiraiya didn’t stop me, but I heard the other two halt their exercise. “Bastard, wait -”

“I’m fine. It’ll be fine. In town, surrounded by people, with dog. Dogs. You can’t skive, you have an exam to pass.”

“Bastard,” Naruto said again, much closer, and I heard Jiraiya mumbling to himself that he’d need to teach him to recognise when a girl was going to slap him. I shook my head, a weirdly overwhelming mix of irritation and despair flaring up. I reached out with kawarimi, no particular destination other than away, and switched. I arrived too close to a wall, with Urushi stumbling his way out the kawarimi with me and tangling round my feet, and I had to fling an awkward hand out to catch myself and not trip over him.

“Slap him,” I mumbled, distractedly checking my palm. Scraped, little bit of blood, ignorable. “ _Slap_ him.” As though kunoichi weren’t taught to disembowel people at exactly the same age as everyone else, why was I trying so damn hard to be a girl if it made people think of me like Jiraiya did? What the hell was I meant to do to fix it?

“Why am I trying at all?” I asked no one in particular, feeling behind me for the wall and sliding down against it until I was huddled on the floor. “I can’t do this. I couldn’t even make the gremlins see that sexy no jutsu was wrong, how the fuck do I deal with Jiraiya? I can’t. I shouldn’t. It’s not my problem, I don’t - I wish he wasn’t there.” I waited for the anger, but it didn’t come. Maybe if I kept talking. “I shouldn’t have told them I was a girl. I shouldn’t have told Naruto I was scared. I shouldn’t - I should’ve stayed as I was before, when no one liked me and it was easy and I was going to -”

I bit the words off, blinking and trying desperately to register where I was and who was in earshot. A side street and no one, luckily; I wasn’t good with secrets but my plan to leave was a secret about _Itachi_ and therefore too important to blurt out because I was feeling daunted. Daunted, and still not angry, and I suddenly missed the clarity being furious gave me.

Urushi whined at my side, nosing up against my shoulder. I dropped my hand on his head and held it there, a mimicry of what Kakashi sometimes did to me.

“I can’t afford to lose an arm,” I told him. “He has to fix it. Kakashi won’t let him not.”

He wagged his tail, licking first my palm and then my chin and, when I turned my head and sputtered, my cheek and the edge of my ear.

“Ok. Ok, ok! Stop, you’re all - _ack._ Ice cream. We’re getting ice cream. Seals will be there later, ice cream waits for no man.”

It didn’t occur to me until after I’d exited the side street and rejoined the crowd that I’d done something risky. As loyal as Urushi was, he was one dog, and the whole point of being in town was that I’d be surrounded by other ninja in case Orochimaru came back. Deserted back alleys didn’t exactly fit the description.

It was just so much to try and keep my head wrapped around. I had to be aware of Orochimaru; I had to be aware that war was looming, even if Konoha was trying to pretend it wasn’t; I had to be aware that I was guarding Itachi’s secrets; I had to be aware that Danzo was an unknown threat who may or may not attack. On top of that I was struggling to come to grips with the fact that I was now _allowed_ to be a girl in a way I never was before, but also that it wasn’t the one size fixes all solution I’d expected it to be and there were still issues that took time to work through. I was trying to be more of a person than a defensive wreck, I was dealing with the terrifying possibility that my arm would never work again, Naruto was being scouted by a teacher that wanted to steal him - and possibly Sakura - away for a multi year training trip, and as much as I was confident that Kakashi was still _somewhere_ he wasn’t where I wanted him to be and I missed him.

It was too much _._

My feet carried me to the Suna compound without my permission, and I was scaling up a nearby building to look over the wall before I realised where I was.

“Stop,” I muttered, shaking my head. War, dingus. Suna may or may not be on the other side of it. What was I doing.

“Uchiha!” someone yelled, and I froze as I looked up, suddenly feeling like I was caught where I wasn’t meant to be. “The fuck are you doing up there? Do you ever stop being weird?”

“ _Karin?_ ” I asked incredulously, blinking down at her. “Why are you in the Suna compound?”

She landed on the top of the wall with a casual ease that had to be deliberate, hands on her hips and glaring at me. “I live here,” she snarked. “Your village kicked my teammates out because they didn’t pass, I didn’t fancy staying by myself in the middle of nowhere, the Kazekage offered me a place. It was a whole thing.” Even as surprised as I was to see her, I was still able to read between the lines: Konoha didn’t want foreign genin in the village at the moment, but as she was still in the exams they couldn’t easily get rid of her. Collecting loose ends together and leaving her with a trusted ally somewhere that was already being guarded was an obvious solution, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the Rain genin that had passed had also been swept into the same compound.

The only question left was whether it’d been entirely Konoha’s decision or whether the Kazekage had wanted her close for whatever reason. It depended, I guessed, on whether the Kazekage was being an ally or not, and though I was hopeful that he was I still had no concrete way to know.

“None of that explains why you’re hanging from a drainpipe,” she continued. “Spill.”

I frowned, returning her glare with one of my own. “I’m not hanging from a drainpipe. And no. It’s secret.”

“You’re absolutely shit at seduction,” she accused. “Why the fuck did they decide to use you to win people over, you suck.”

“I - _what?_ ”

She held up a hand, miming counting on her fingers. “First you nearly kill me and make my teammates hate me for losing the scroll. Then you fight like a bitch who won’t actually face me and insult me as you do it. Then you forfeit, what the hell. _Then_ you walk away and don’t want to talk to me, and then you completely forget I exist and abandon me in the stands to go fuss over your teammate instead.” She ran out of fingers and waved to underline her final point. “And now you come back, I assume to apologise and grovel and start schmoozing again, and you don’t even smile when you see me. You’re giving mixed messages here, Konoha. A girl could feel unwanted.”

“Apologise and grovel,” I repeated in disbelief. “Do you have so much chakra it fried your brain, I’m not _schmoozing._ And I didn’t nearly kill you! I threatened to, and I didn’t know I was threatening _you_ I thought you were just some random person with a scroll!”

“See, that right there. You talk like I’m important and powerful so I’m meant to like you because you flatter me, then you act like a dick and blow it. You _suck._ ”

“I - _no._ The fuck. I’m not even here for you.” I deliberately looked down to where Urushi was waiting and dropped to the floor next to him, brushing my hand over his ear to say sorry for forgetting he couldn’t climb.

“You’re not?” Karin repeated, sounding suddenly a lot less sure of herself. She rallied though, and crossed her arms with a glower. “Of course you’re not, you’re incompetent. Who were you here for then?”

“Incomp - I’m getting ice cream! The hell are you being so aggressive for, I literally did nothing to deserve this.” She opened her mouth to contradict that and I waved, backtracking. “Today. I did nothing today. The other stuff doesn’t count, I didn’t know you were family then.”

“You keep saying that, but you don’t look anything like me,” she pointed out. She didn’t give me chance to correct her though and just rolled her eyes - completely over the top, obviously exaggerated, zero points for believability - and stepped off the wall to land in front of me, already walking towards the marketplace. “Fine. You buy me ice cream, I’ll accept your apology, I know words are hard for you.”

“Convenient, since apparently listening is beyond you,” I retorted, catching up. Her shoulders might have relaxed a fraction when she noticed I was following, I might have been too annoyed to pay attention to it, who knew. “What part of _not even here for you_ went over your head? I wanted Gaara.”

“The redhead lunatic with the murder-chakra? Why? He’s a lunatic and he has murder-chakra.” She squinted at me suspiciously. “Are you trying to recruit him as well?”

There were too many things wrong with that sentence. “He’s not a lunatic,” I said. “And the murder-chakra’s fine, stop being so sensitive.”

“Oh, sure, because that’s a thing I can just turn off -”

“And,” I continued, talking over her. “I’m not recruiting anyone, so you can stop getting uppity about it because it is not, will not, and I promise you _never has been_ happening.” She snorted. I gave her a pinched look. It may have been harassed. I was feeling harassed. “Also, go back to the compound. You’re not meant to be this side of the wall without a guide.”

She shrugged and made no move to leave. “Guess I’ll stick with you then,” she said, and I made a wordless sound of frustration and glared at her.

She stuck. Bull and Akino joined us partway to the ice cream stall, Bull with a drool-laden whuff and Akino with a sharp glare for taking off with only Urushi for company. I ducked my head, unsure if I felt guilty for not thinking or annoyed at the fussing; the fact that Pakkun had sent Bull said he was taking the whole thing seriously because Bull still wasn’t technically allowed out in the village, but in daylight with other ninja hopping overhead or walking around I honestly didn’t think there was that much danger. There had to be a difference between being careful and subjecting yourself to voluntary house arrest, and going to the fecking market was not exactly a high risk mission.

Attempting to buy Karin an ice cream though, that was a different matter.

“Chocolate,” she insisted.

“Chocolate is shit,” I countered with infallible logic. “It’s just brown and sweet. You need a sharper flavour to cut through all the sugar and cream, otherwise it doesn’t taste of anything.”

“Chocolate,” she repeated, unmoving.

“Pick a fruit,” I said, also unmoving.

“Um,” the girl behind the counter said. “Chocolate is made of beans, if that counts? It’s good, I promise. It’s got chocolate chips in it, it’s not just brown and sweet.”

Karin turned to me with smug triumph. “Listen to the lady,” she said. “Screw your fruit. Chocolate.”

“Uncultured heathen. Fine. Have the shit ice cream, you’re only hurting yourself.” And, to prove a point, I ignored the matcha one I was going to get and went instead for a similar shade of green that turned out to be kiwi. Interesting choice for ice cream. Still infinitely better than chocolate.

We retreated to one of the small parks that dotted the village, this one along the river with several benches that we both ignored in favour of the grass. Bull provided the backrest, because Bull was lovely like that, Akino once again set himself to patrolling the perimeter, and Urushi took position by my knee where he was the perfect height to steal a lick of the ice cream that dribbled down the side of my cone.

Karin pulled a face. “That’s disgusting,” she complained. “Do you know how many diseases animals can have in their mouths?”

“No one asked you,” I huffed. “He’s not going to share yours, yours is pants. Let him have his ice cream.”

“No. First thing I’d do if I joined your shitty village would be to make people not be idiots about getting sick. I’m not healing people who were stupid, they can find someone else to deal with them.”

I stuck my tongue out at her, then deliberately took a mouthful of kiwi and savoured it. She didn’t need to know that he’d only licked the cone and I wasn’t interested in eating that bit, that wasn’t the point.

She also didn’t need to roll her eyes and hit me in my bad arm, but I suppressed the surprised wince as it tugged on my shoulder and swallowed my ice cream instead. “Mm. Bacteria flavour. Delightful.”

She hit me again, deliberately, eyes narrowed as she watched for a reaction. “You’re such a child. If this is an act to make me lower my guard I swear I’ll get up and leave, then you’ll have to find someone else to join up and fix your problems for you.”

“I don’t have problems.” I frowned, parsing the rest of her sentence. “And I don’t act. Also what the fuck, don’t join Konoha. Are you insane? That’s literally the worst idea.”

Not that announcing that fact out loud in a public park was ideal, but it was fine. Akino would be on higher alert if someone was in hearing distance, and Karin needed to know.

She turned to stare at me disbelieving and I frowned harder. “Literally the worst,” I repeated. “Why would you even suggest it.”

“Because you’ve been trying to recruit me since the preliminaries?” she said, voice rising in a question. “Maybe since the forest? Though. Badly.”

“I _told_ you, I didn’t -”

“Know I was family, you said. And I’m not.” She raised her eyebrows and gave me a very obvious once over that left me stiffening with indignation. “I’ve met random civilians with chakra that’s more like mine than yours is.”

I paused. She’d met Naruto, hadn’t she? At the match. I swear I introduced them. “You’re not my cousin,” I said, slowly, tilting my head at her in confusion. “You’re Uzumaki. I’m Uchiha. You’re _Naruto’s_ cousin. The blond one with the smiles and the whiskers.” If she was basing it on recognising people’s chakra, was the kyuubi throwing her off? I didn’t have a way to ask without blowing that secret, though I didn’t know if her sensing would have already told her.

“Your teammate?” she clarified. “The other one that tried to kill me for my scroll, and hates me for breaking your arm?”

“He didn’t try to kill you, he was just there while I did. Which I still didn’t, anyway. Saying I did doesn’t change that I was just threatening. And no, he doesn’t hate anyone, don’t be ridiculous.” 

She hummed dubiously, and I floundered. How did you go about convincing someone of the inherent and unfailing goodness of their cousin when it was so obvious that no convincing should be necessary? It was just. Fact. One plus one is two, Naruto is good, I didn’t know why these things were true I just knew that they were.

“I did break your arm then,” she said, dropping the subject of family. “You didn’t deny it. Is that what you’re after? You want me to heal it?”

I hunched protectively over it. “It’s fine,” I said defensively. Then I realised what I was doing and straightened, annoyed at my reaction. “And would you stop trying to find an ulterior motive? _You_ invited yourself along. _I_ wanted to eat my ice cream and mope about the world being unfair.”

“With Gaara. The super powerful guy from Suna who people are saying you used some dark Konoha mind trick to gain control of.” She snorted. “Sure, no ulterior motives there.”

“With Gaara who saved my life and is a friend, dickhead.” I took a rebellious bite of ice cream, and regretted it as the cold made my teeth ache. “They’re really saying I’m controlling him?”

“Do your own spying, I don’t work for Konoha yet.”

“Oh for fuck’s sake,” I hissed, surprising her as I twisted and jabbed her in the chest with a chakra arm. It didn’t have quite the same effect as using my actual hand, but that was occupied. “Don’t work for Konoha,” I instructed. “Konoha’s shit. Maybe Grass is also shit, I don’t know, Konoha’s still shitter.”

She leaned back, uncertainty flickering over her face before it settled back into a belligerent scowl. “The hell does that mean?”

“It means it’s shit, genius -”

“You’re Konoha,” she said stubbornly. “This cousin you’re so hot on is Konoha. Do you actually want me or -”

“I,” I interrupted, as clearly as I could, “am not Konoha. For the millionth time. I’m Uchiha. I was born in Konoha. I live here. That doesn’t make me _Konoha._ ”

In the back of my thoughts, I felt something settle that had been uneasy for a while now. In my mind, Konoha had always been the villain, toweringly imposing and dark, and when that black and white world view had been challenged - it had thrown me. People who I thought were unquestioningly loyal weren’t. Or they were, but that didn’t mean they had to agree with everything Konoha did, or that they couldn’t see there were problems. People could be ninja and still be nice. People could be part of something bad, and still be good.

It had felt like a betrayal, like turning my back on Itachi and throwing my lot in with the system that killed my clan, and if I _was_ Konoha and I was defining myself by the village then of course it mattered when the village’s morals didn’t line up to mine. Child soldiers, casual sexism, a class system of inequality - seeing them in an enemy is very different to seeing them in something you identify with, but that was the thing. I didn’t have to identify with it. The village not being all bad didn’t make the parts that _were_ any less unforgivable. Admitting that I’d been wrong about some things didn’t mean I was switching sides or ignoring what they’d done.

It didn’t make me Konoha. I just lived here.

Karin was looking at me oddly, but something of my certainty must’ve come through because she actually seemed to get it this time. Or part of it, at least. “I’m not Grass,” she said, haltingly, as though she felt like she was going to be punished for it. “My blood heals people. That’s all they want.”

I leaned back a fraction, relaxing. “I have a dojutsu,” I said, and didn’t need to elaborate. She understood.

We lapsed back into silence. She finished her ice cream in absent bites because apparently her teeth were made of steel and brain freeze was a foreign country, but it took me a while longer before I’d got out everything I wanted from mine and passed the cone over to the dogs. Akino wasn’t interested, and Bull sniffed it then gave a disapproving whuff, so Urushi got the lot.

“Suna, then?” Karin said after a while. “Not Konoha and not Grass, that doesn’t exactly leave a lot of options.”

I blinked. “I’m so pale I’m translucent,” I protested. “Are you trying to give me skin cancer?”

She waved me off. “Don’t be a baby, I can heal your sunburn. Your murder-friend’s in Suna anyway, it makes sense.”

I checked Akino. Still no sign he’d picked up anyone in hearing range. Though, actually, how sure was I that I wanted the dogs to overhear this conversation, my plans to abscond to Itachi were too secret even for Kakashi to know.

Wait. How sure was I that I wanted Karin to overhear this conversation?

“I’m not looking for a new village,” I hedged. Then, to steer the topic back to safer waters, I wrinkled my nose. “Also, ew. I thought you said your healing relied on blood?”

“You just have to bite me, it’s not bad.” She looked at me searchingly, then her face lit up. “Unless you’re _squeamish_ about it?”

“Do not,” I warned. “No. I’m not - squeamish? God, Karin. We’re ninja. Stop that - no, fucking - off!”

“It’s just a bite,” she practically crooned, advancing with her forearm bared. This close I could see the patchwork of scars, and no, there was no way in hell they were ‘just’ bites, not if they went deep enough to leave marks like that. “Come on Uchiha, it’s only fair. I broke your arm, I fix your arm, it’s the right thing to do.”

“My arm is perfectly fine as it - _do not_ \- ow, let go -”

“Just a little bit of blood, a little bit for the little baby.”

“Fucking _psychopath_ , Urushi help -”

It was with a clearer head that I left Karin at the Suna compound. A clearer head, a faint scar under my eye in place of the cut from Orochimaru, and no more dull ache in the parts of my arm that weren’t numb. As off-putting as the entire concept of ingesting someone else’s life force was, I couldn’t deny that it was effective.

Not out loud, of course. She was already far too pleased with herself, she didn’t need encouragement.

But, clearer head. The arm situation still wasn’t great, though it was improved by not being broken anymore under the seal. Jiraiya, though, with his perversion and his problematic view of women: not my problem. I didn’t have to fix everything I saw wrong in the world, and it was hardly any wonder that I’d felt overwhelmed that morning when I thought I had to try.

“Like Pakkun said,” I explained to Urushi as we started to make our way back to where I assumed the others were still training. “Puppies. Trying to run too fast for our paws, or however he put it. I’m going to survive, it’s going to be good, everyone else can go fuck themselves.” I paused. “Ok, maybe not that last bit. That seems a bit harsh.” He titled his head and made an enquiring noise, and I ran my fingers soothingly over his head. “I don’t actually want them to fuck themselves,” I promised him. “I just also don’t want to die of stress, so I’ve decided to set a limit on the number of people I care about. A VIP list. You’re on it. So’s Kakashi.”

Urushi, Kakashi, the dogs. Team Seven. Team Ten, but not Asuma. Gaara. Karin, because she was being stubborn about not talking to Naruto and I needed to keep an eye on her until they worked things out. And, of course, Itachi.

Jiraiya was not.

I paused though, thinking of Gaara, and looked back over my shoulder at the compound. He hadn’t been there, again, and I wondered if there was any truth in what Karin had said about people suspecting me of controlling him. From the outside, the way he’d thrown the match would have looked odd, but come on. _Someone_ had to have noticed that there was a person hiding under all the bloodlust. My memories of the original timeline were shakier than they should be, but I was pretty sure that his siblings at least stood with him after Naruto talked to him. The whole village made him the damn kage in the end, what the hell. The lack of faith they were showing now was uncalled for.

Someone moved in the vague area of empty space I’d been resting my eyes on while I thought, and I blinked back into awareness - and froze. From the upstairs window of the main diplomatic building, Rasa was looking back at me, one eyebrow raised and arms crossed in a considering pose.

I unfocussed my eyes again and let my gaze sweep past him as though I hadn’t noticed, then turned and continued walking, not letting any of my tension show. I had no reason to be tense. He didn’t know I was the mysterious ANBU Weasel who’d brought him back into line; as far as he was concerned my only importance was my friendship with Gaara. _Maybe_ my connection to Karin as well, if there was more to her ending up in the Suna compound than just logistics, but that was all.

Still. I was glad I had the dogs, and if I managed to slip around the other side of Bull so his giant size hid me from view, then that was nobody’s business but mine.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Karin: So, when I jump ship from my village and join yours -  
> Sasuke: I will fight you on this.  
> Karin: Ok fine, so when we both jump ship from our villages,
> 
> And that, my lovelies, marks the end of the chunin exam arc. Honestly I was wondering if I should finish the arc after the preliminaries, but the story is first and foremost a character story so this felt like a better place to call it. (Though potentially the chunin exams were _two_ arcs, with a break between the forest and the preliminaries, but nyeh.)
> 
> I'm going to take a minor pause to organise my thoughts for the next one, but when I do: war. See you then!


	34. Chapter 34

Four days. Four days of no Kakashi, four days of no progress on the seal. Jiraiya had taken the decision to drill us all on our water walking skills, and using the faultless logic that hot water was harder to control than cold, he declared the onsen the perfect place to train.

Naturally.

How we didn’t get ourselves thrown out, I had no idea - the fact that we were in one of the pools with our clothes and shoes on, the fact that Jiraiya kept moseying off to ‘keep watch’, the fact that we were hardly quiet and respectful of the onsen atmosphere, any of them. The only thing I could think of was that Jiraiya was actually telling the truth and it was a standard thing for genin teams to use the hot water for training, but that seemed a convenient excuse at best.

I grit my teeth and reminded myself that he wasn’t my problem. Sakura also seemed to be biting her tongue, too practical to jeopardise the training she needed, but too annoyed to treat it as more than a purely professional relationship. Not that Jiraiya was helping in that aspect; he seemed to oscillate between wanting us all to like him and treat him like an actual sensei, and deliberately playing the fool to push us all away. The only one he seemed remotely comfortable around was Naruto, and even then he spent most of his time trying to egg him on into losing his temper.

But like I said. Whatever commitment issues he had, they were his issues. He could work through them on his own time.

And in fairness, when he managed to pay attention and be competent, he was a good teacher. He couldn’t fix my seal - yet - but he could pass on just enough hints for Sakura to doggedly work through her own basic seals, and though the inventive aspects of it weren’t her forte, he seemed genuinely impressed at the rate she absorbed technical information and understood it. At least, the rate she absorbed information when she had it to absorb, and they didn’t seem to agree on how frequently that happened.

“If I show you how I’d solve it, you’ll just turn into a not-as-good version of me,” he argued. “A seal’s as unique as the person who creates it, you need to find your own solution.”

“If you show me how you’d solve it I can pull your method apart and remake it,” Sakura countered. “Sealing _arrays_ are unique, but they’re made up of standard components just like jutsu are. What I need is a sample array so that I can find the components in it and use them to build my own.”

“Or a dictionary,” I added, unable to help myself. I’d tried listening in on the lessons, but it had only confirmed what I already knew: the sharingan could help me _decipher_ seals, but I had negative skill when it came to writing them. It was as though seals had thirty seven different ways of representing the same concept, and though I could tell by looking at a seal what that concept _was_ , if I tried to go the other way I had no idea which of the thirty seven variants I should be using or how it would link into the rest of the array. Or how I should be shaping my chakra into it; in the same way that I’d reduced my bubble to one handseal and my kawarimi to none, the few seals Jiraiya had demonstrated for us left a lot of details implied by the _way_ he wrote the seal rather than the actual content of it.

Which was great if your aim in life was to make your seals unusable by anyone else. Absolutely pants from a dictionary building perspective. Not pants enough to stop me stealing everything I could and giving it to Sakura in cheat-sheet format, but still pants.

“Or a dictionary,” she repeated, nodding, and Jiraiya slumped.

“It’s an art,” he said morosely. “You can’t reduce creative genius to a list of components. Where’s the beauty in that?”

“I can make it pretty when it works,” Sakura said, with what I assumed was no intent to follow through and Jiraiya gave a put-upon sigh and leaned over her latest attempt to drop a cryptic clue about where she’d gone wrong.

It was by far his favourite teaching style. That, and survive-or-die style training, and his insistence on throwing things at Naruto was at least improving Naruto’s reflexes and his ability to throw them back. The order of the day today was a vile smelling oil bullet that had made Naruto nearly gag the first time it hit him; he was allowed to use anything he liked to block it, so long as he didn’t leave the surface of the onsen, and so long as he didn’t allow any of the oil to fall in the water and contaminate it.

Again, how the frick was this allowed. Even if we were in one of the smaller baths with no one else there, the onsen was still a public space; filling it with toad yuck _really_ didn’t feel legal. Maybe it was meant to be added motivation for Naruto not to screw up, though given that his nose was now confirmed as more sensitive than mine and even I was struggling to block out the smell, I didn’t think he needed it. It didn’t help that his wind jutsu tended to scatter the oil in every direction and he was relying on rapid-fire bucket clones to try and catch the drops before they splashed anything. Or that Jiraiya had forced him to wear a blindfold while he did it.

On the plus side, he’d got _really_ fast at ducking.

As for me, I was getting to grips with using my chakra arm as a replacement for my dead one. I’d already known that it was the same basic technique that I used to reach things for kawarimi, just with added water chakra to give it the solidity it needed to interact with the physical world, but Jiraiya took it one step further and had me infuse the arm with actual water as opposed to just my chakra. It needed me to be pretty close to a decent sized water source - such as, would you look at that, what a coincidence, a heated bathing pool - and a whole new way of thinking to control it, but it also gave me a massive boost in how strong the arm was and what I could do with it.

In theory, I could shape the water into anything I wanted. It was an arm at the moment, complete with vaguely blobby fingers, but that was just what I was used to - it could be a dragon, whip, hail of shuriken, even just using it as a signal or a distraction now that the water made it visible. In theory. Given the massive headache it was giving me to turn the blobby fingers into finger-shaped fingers, I wasn’t entirely convinced it would be worth it. Not for a battle, at least, not until I’d got a lot better at visualising the shape of it as well as where I wanted it to go.

Four days though of training, dogs, one more failed attempt to find Gaara - this time with Sakura and Naruto in tow and they were both disappointingly relieved when he wasn’t there - and then, on the fifth morning, Konoha was at war.

The six Sound genin Orochimaru had sent to the chunin exams were dead. Their bodies were found at dawn, displayed around the village and impossible to miss; one each on the Hokage monument, the academy, the village gates. One in the civilian market, one by the hospital, one towards the centre of the largest residential district. All dead, all with their eyes slashed, semi-dried blood dribbling down their chins - the gossip that was difficult to control at the best of times was running rampant, and it claimed that the corpses were missing their tongues.

I didn’t know who got close enough to check that. The civilians that had discovered the display in the market and the residential district had panicked, and the rumours ran faster in response, reassuring them that this was deliberate, this was Konoha’s doing, the Sound genin were the enemy and killing them was our way of showing how serious we were and that we wouldn’t back down.

Too fast. I didn’t say it, and neither did anyone else, but those more reassuring rumours felt too much like damage control for me to believe them. _Someone_ had killed six genin and left them around the village as a visible and gruesome declaration of war - someone had taken the care to ensure they’d be found by the civilians before they could be tidied away and hidden - but as much as Konoha tried to claim credit for it, and as much as the Hokage waxed lyrical about the Will of Fire in the speech he made later that day, it felt more in keeping with Orochimaru’s style.

You thought you were keeping them hostage, the bodies said. You thought you had leverage over me, you thought you had the upper hand. I could have got them back any time I wanted.

You thought your village was secure, the message went. I broke into your holding cells, I went to your academy and your market and the street you build your houses on. The war will be on your land, and the collateral damage will fall on you.

The Hokage’s speech was jarring. I wasn’t expecting Konoha to have the same approach to it that I did - they were a military dictatorship, of course their views would be different - but to me it was still a given that war was declared by the victims. You went to war because someone had wronged you, because they were denying you your rights or because you were backed so far into a corner you didn’t have any other way out. Or you went to war to defend someone, or liberate someone, or because your people were desperate and you needed to _feed_ someone, any number of reasons that could make war seem like the best option of what you had left.

I knew that wasn’t all of it. I wasn’t naive. I knew that war was as much about profits and polling statistics as anything else, but still: no one ever thinks of themselves as the aggressor. In your own mind, you’re a hero, and the most contested and unpopular wars were the ones that blurred that line and made it harder for people to justify themselves as right.

In that mindset, Orochimaru’s brutal murdering of his own genin - and the very obvious threat in the way he’d chosen to leave their bodies on display - was the perfect rallying point. What better way to keep the population behind you than to be the only thing standing between them and a remorseless killer? Orochimaru had handed Konoha all the justification they needed on a shiny silver platter, all Konoha had to do was play on the fear people felt in response and use it to keep them controlled.

Except, ninja. The Hokage didn’t need the population’s support, and even if he did he wouldn’t get it by being a victim. Plus, remorseless killers were everywhere. It was hardly novel.

“We will not be merciful,” he promised, and the crowd stood straighter in response. “Our leaders will not hesitate and our ninja will not fail. We are the strongest of the hidden villages and if Orochimaru has fallen so far to have forgotten what it means that we fight with the Will of Fire in our hearts -” his voice had risen as he spoke, ringing out over the square in front of the Hokage tower; he was stood on the balcony and it felt like the entire of Konoha had piled in to listen and the _noise_ they made made the uniformed ninja standing stern-faced and silent round the edges seem all the more terrifying in comparison, but here the Hokage held up his hands and the whole village dropped to a reverential to hush to listen. “Then,” he continued, quieter and with deadly intent, “We will remind him.”

I buried my fingers in the rough hair at the back of Urushi’s neck while the crowd roared and tried desperately not to be sick.

If I was expecting a swathe of changes now that we were officially at war, I was disappointed. Information was scarce. Konoha didn’t have a newspaper, and I didn’t trust the official announcements any more than I trusted the rumour mill. The war against Sound seemed as much a propaganda war as anything else; the Hokage - or at least, someone on his council - was going to great efforts to spin everything so that Konoha was glorious, righteous, powerful, everything I didn’t believe for a second that it was.

Orochimaru hit the supply trains. Konoha publicised that he’d stooped so low as to hire bandits to do his dirty work, and put jounin on the next ones, either to guard civilian caravans or to ferry crucial resources themselves in storage scrolls. The civilians were told that the Hokage took their protection seriously; the ninja, I’m sure, read between the lines and realised that if Orochimaru _had_ only hired bandits, Konoha would have sent chunin to deal with them.

Fresh seafood vanished from the market. Some river species such as carp were available, as were an assortment of surimi products made from ground and frozen fish meat, but the fresh saltwater fish that Ito-san used to stock were replaced with cuts of pork, heavy with fat and marinated in red dyes for victory.

“Thought I’d show my support,” he said. He seemed so convinced of it that I half wondered if it was a coincidence that we imported fish but farmed our own pigs locally.

Weapons. There was an unspoken agreement that active duty ninja had first call on new kunai and shuriken during war, and it was only common sense that if you weren’t on a mission you wouldn’t waste your good shuriken in training, but I squinted suspiciously at the reduced stock available in the shop and thought, privately, that if I were Orochimaru and I were basically laying siege to a village like Konoha, their iron trade would be almost as high priority as their food to take out.

But I didn’t know. I didn’t _know._ I’d never lived through a war before. It felt like we were being informed of just enough losses to fuel our outrage and plenty of victories to keep us bloodthirsty, but none of that lined up with what I thought I could see around me. Orochimaru was no match for our ninja, of course, but civilian traders in the capital were advised to stay there and not risk the journey home. I only knew that because Sakura’s mother was one of them. Orochimaru wasn’t a threat to _Konoha,_ don’t be ridiculous, but ANBU were drafted to patrol the walls and I saw the academy running evacuation drills to the mountain.

Training was abandoned. Or at least reworked to fit into other duties; I progressed beyond fingers and into crude shovel-shapes with my water arm, and without Jiraiya to push him towards projectiles and defensive work, Naruto went back to training with his clones. He was still getting used to his variety of non-human forms; currently he was working on dragonflies and attempting to negotiate four very un-birdlike wings and eyes that, while being some of the sharpest and fastest in the animal kingdom, delivered a compound vision that was apparently hellish to decipher. Sakura stuck with her seals, fighting her way through a series of basic utility scrolls that I was pretty sure she’d got from Ino to find out how they worked. Not that Ino had much experience with seals herself, but her clan were easily wealthy enough to have some that she could borrow and I copied more than one of them out with sharingan-assisted accuracy so that Sakura could rage at them at her leisure. 

What little leisure we had, at least. The normal missions were still coming in - _how_ , if it was too dangerous to travel outside the village - and with so many of our ninja occupied on whatever mysterious but heroic war duties they were running, it fell to the genin and the genin corps to fulfil them. The corps took the out of village missions, we took what amounted to a never ending supply of d-ranks, and though Jiraiya showed up occasionally to check on us as we cleared escape tunnels or stock-checked the hospital, we did most of it with the dogs or other genin teams for company.

I recognised some from the exam. Some were old enough that I suspected they’d failed out and changed careers, or weren’t genin at all and were meant to be retired to desk jobs. It seemed rude to ask, and as curious as I was I had to remember that Konoha’s problems weren’t my problems, even if it was jarring to realise exactly how much the genin corps usually did for the village that they had to draft in so many extra people to replace them. I knew that roughly two thirds of our academy class had ended up in the corps, but I hadn’t exactly been social back then and I didn’t know or talk to any of them.

Ino did. Chouji was still on enforced bed rest - Kankuro’s poison was apparently a hellish combination of slow acting and difficult to eradicate, and though Chouji wasn’t in danger of dying from it anymore he also wasn’t putting any weight back on and his recovery was suffering as a result - but Ino and Shikamaru had been drafted into d-ranks the same as we had, and we sometimes overlapped.

“Covering missions is only part of it,” she explained. “Sound’s targeting their patrol routes and the outposts, they’ve had to double team sizes for defence and send reinforcements.”

I frowned, trying to work through the numbers. “The outposts cover the whole of Fire and the borders,” I said unsurely. “If Sound’s going after them _and_ all the trading routes, that’d be…” I gave up counting. “A lot. Huge. How does he have that many people?”

“Missing nin? Mercenaries? He’s already hiring bandits, mercenaries is a logical next step.”

“They said he was hiring bandits,” I corrected, and though Sakura and Naruto didn’t blink at me doubting the Hokage’s word Ino seemed taken aback.

“It’s not just bandits,” Shikamaru said. “Or mercenaries. It’s the same heavy hitters, and it doesn’t matter that he’s not got a lot of them because he just sends them out multiple times a day.”

Sound four? Or five, if Kimmimaro was still fighting. Maybe? With their curse seal they should qualify as heavy hitters, but I thought they’d been defeated by the Rookie 12 in the original timeline. Granted, the original timeline - or my memory of it - wasn’t a particularly reliable source of information, but I definitely felt like something was missing.

“Across the whole of Fire country though?” Sakura asked dubiously. “Small groups of high level shinobi make strike teams, not armies.”

“Which is exactly why they’re going to lose,” Ino concluded. “Orochimaru’s too ambitious and stretching himself too thin; he’s going to exhaust his jounin by overusing them, and once they’re dead he’s lost. All we have to do is keep fighting until they make a mistake, it barely even counts as war.”

Shikamaru shrugged, not quite managing to hit his usual level of lazy. “Sure,” he drawled. “That’s the reason our dads have been pulling back to back shifts. Because there’s barely a war and nothing to worry about.”

“I didn’t say there was nothing to worry about,” Ino replied tartly. “But seriously? Our dads are pulling back to back shifts. Sound’s going to get _destroyed._ ”

I wasn’t convinced, but Ino wasn’t alone in her confidence. We ran into Team Gai a couple of times for morning workouts - Ino had apparently made good on her promise to get Tenten to train with her, and without Chouji as a buffer Shikamaru had been forced to drag us along for moral support to keep him from having to deal with Lee. I took one look at the way Lee’s eyes started welling up when he realised I wasn’t keeping my bad arm still for the fun of it, and made the executive decision to test my blobby water hand against Shikamaru’s shadow on the other side of the field.

From Sakura’s pinched expression I don’t think she appreciated my decision, but Naruto at least just rolled his eyes and offered to spar with Lee until he’d calmed down. Neji didn’t show up often - understandable, given that it was his cousin at the centre of the war, even if Konoha was still being cagey about the details - but when he did he looked more exhausted than not, and was supremely uninterested in training with or talking to anyone outside his team. I didn’t have a baseline to know whether this was normal for him or not, but based on Tenten’s unhappy expression when he flatly ignored Sakura or put down Lee’s latest youthful claim with a deadpan monotone that even to me sounded lacklustre, I was going for not.

“Even their elite know better than to tangle with our will of fire!” Lee declared, one time when Neji wasn’t there to stop him. “Engaging our genin corps and our civilians, then running as soon as our ninja arrive - they should be ashamed of such unyouthful tactics!”

“You are aware that we’re ninja and we stab people in the back when they’re asleep,” I said. Not very loudly, because Lee’s attention was a dangerous thing to catch, but Shikamaru heard me.

“Who put salt in your coffee?” he asked, equally quietly. “I swear you didn’t used to be this sarcastic.”

“I’m not sarcastic. I’m right. Also, hold up. _Coffee?_ ” I hadn’t had coffee since my old life. I hadn’t _seen_ coffee since my old life, I’d assumed Konoha didn’t have it. Definitely not in cafes - tea shops were a thing, cafes weren’t - and I hadn’t noticed either beans or instant coffee in the shops, but maybe I was looking in the wrong place?

I’d have to shelve it for later though, because Lee had moved on to bemoaning the fact that genin weren’t included in the heroics, and describing how he’d run a thousand laps around Konoha with a boulder on his back so he’d be fast enough to catch a Sound ninja if he ever did get deployed to fight them.

“It won’t be a question of running faster,” Sakura said “If it was, we’d already have caught them, by tracking if nothing else.” 

“Except that we don’t have enough trackers to cover the whole of Fire,” Tenten pointed out. “That’s exactly the problem - no one knows where the Sound guys are going to be, and they only attack when they know they’re going to win and get out before backup arrives.”

“They don’t _win_ ,” Lee began hotly, but Naruto had begun speaking at the same time and he subsided.

“That doesn’t make sense,” he said. “You can appear and disappear like that to get away with things, but only if you know exactly where you’re going and the people you’re escaping from don’t. As soon as there’s someone who knows the backstreets as well as you do, you get caught.”

“As soon as Iruka’s the one chasing you, you mean,” Sakura added teasingly, and Naruto flashed her a grin and didn’t deny it. 

Ino scoffed, shooting him an annoyed look. “Sound aren’t evading academy instructors, it’s not the same. But Sakura’s right; we don’t beat them by running, we beat them by working out how they’re getting around and where their base is. They have to have one in Fire somewhere - there’s no way they’re going back to Sound between each attack.”

“No way that we know of,” Tenten argued. “They could be using a seal, or have someone with a bloodlimit we don’t know about. We can’t rule it out.”

Ino’s face said that they very much could, but she didn’t outright say it, and I looked between her and a suspiciously quiet Shikamaru trying to work out what they knew. Of all of us - with the possible exception of Neji, except he’d avoided any war discussion like the plague - they were the most likely to know given their family connections, but they were also likely to understand how important it was not to share secrets, particularly if what they knew contradicted what we were officially being told.

Not that we were officially told much. Most of the information we had - any of us had - was coming through conversations exactly like this, people passing on what their senseis had said, what their family members had seen, what gossip they’d won from the gate guards or what gaps they’d been able to fill in and work out for themselves. After the initial stage of unease most people were feeling buoyed by the fact that Sound hadn’t dared attack Konoha itself, and were treating the whole thing as a series of particularly annoying transport disruptions with a sprinkling of patriotic feel-good-factor for flavour.

I wasn’t. Neither was Kakashi, and I hung back when we started splitting up to go back to d-ranks and tugged on Shikamaru’s sleeve to get his attention.

“They’re watching Sound,” I said, quietly but not bothering to soften my bluntness. “That’s what your dad’s doing, that’s why there aren’t enough ninja in Fire to deal with the attacks. That’s how Ino knows their ninjas aren’t going back between attacks.”

“My dad’s trying to end the war with as few casualties as possible,” he corrected mildly, raising an eyebrow and neither confirming nor denying what I’d said. I shot him a frustrated glare then caught myself and swallowed it, dropping a hand down to Urushi to remind myself that I didn’t care about Konoha’s mind games. Maybe the Sound operation was being kept quiet so Konoha could disavow all knowledge if it failed, maybe it was being kept quiet because it was still in the ambush stages and Orochimaru wasn’t meant to know. It didn’t matter.

What mattered was, “Is Kakashi there?”

He didn’t answer for a long moment, just glanced at Urushi then looked forward with his hands in his pockets and his posture almost aggressively slumped.

“Shikamaru,” I pressed. Naruto and Sakura were waiting. I hadn’t checked, but I had no doubt Ino was too. “I honestly don’t care if it’s classified. Did they send Kakashi to Sound?”

“I don’t know,” he finally said, and when I shook my head in agitation he repeated it. “It’s not just classified. It’s beyond classified. If you haven’t been told then there’s a reason for it -”

“Right,” I cut across, stepping away and towards my team. “No, you’re right. Sorry. I shouldn’t have asked.”

“Sasuke -”

“I’ve got d-ranks to do. See you later.”

Kiba and Shino weren’t released from hospital until several days after war was declared, long enough to realistically deny that the two events were linked. Not that anyone did outright deny it, or offer any alternate explanation other than ‘not ready to leave the hospital yet’, but Hinata’s kidnapping and her role as the instigator for the war was something that was still being kept under wraps.

We knew, of course. From the way Team Ten didn’t seem particularly surprised that it was just Kiba and Shino left, I suspected they’d either been told or worked it out. The exact details were still unclear; I was certain that it had been Orochimaru to kill the Sound genin and officially push Konoha to war, but I didn’t know if Konoha had been moving against Otogakure before then and he’d retaliated, or if he’d just decided to take advantage of the unrest and push up the timescale of his invasion. As far as his drawn out attempted siege could be called an invasion, anyway. And in all honesty, it wasn’t unreasonable that it genuinely _had_ taken that long for Team Eight to be ready to leave, or for Kiba to be ready at least, and even though he was allowed out he still had to go back for regular progress checks.

He was in a wheelchair when he and Shino joined the group for a ‘yay you got out of hospital’ dinner, and self conscious of it if his posture was anything to go by. Akamaru was sticking close but he’d also gained another dog, a larger grey one that looked almost like a husky and was apparently one of the three brothers that usually stayed with his sister. He told us later that it had been a different brother each time we’d seen him, but given that they all answered to Haimaru and all looked identical, I hadn’t been able to tell.

The bandages around his head were gone. So was a fair chunk of hair, leaving him with shaved sides under his usual messy brown that clearly showed the spider-web of lightning burn scars from where Orochimaru attacked him. They fanned out from just over his ear up to his temple and down to the edge of his jaw, and in the other direction curved almost to the base of his skull, and though he wore his familiar fluffy parka he kept the hood deliberately down so as not to hide them.

“It’s so people know which ear I’m deaf in,” he quipped, tilting his chin up. “This side got fried, that side I’m just ignoring you. I wanted people to be sure.”

“Considerate of you,” I said, and he shot me an instinctive glare before he caught himself and replaced it with a grimace. I blinked; I hadn’t meant it meanly. It was more that when I was feeling vulnerable I’d much rather people were teasing or brusque than showed me any sympathy. Particularly people I didn’t know very well, and I’d kind of assumed that we weren’t close enough friends for emotions.

Kiba had been loud and brash at the academy, and frequently hung out with Naruto. I’d avoided him on principle, and spent more time with Orochimaru’s fake-him than the real him since we’d graduated. Honestly, I’d assumed we weren’t friends at all, close or otherwise. Maybe he was just feeling defensive - Ichiraku was a street stall with a counter too high for him to reach from his wheelchair and stools too narrow for him to easily balance on; Yakiniku had a choice of low tables to kneel at or close booths where the only place for a wheelchair to fit was at the end of the table with the wheels sticking out into the aisle. Of the two Yakiniku was the obvious choice - the restaurant was big enough that people could easily have detoured around him, and none of the staff so much as batted an eye at either the wheelchair or the total of four dogs we were bringing with us (we had Guruko and Urushi today, plus I think Shiba though she never came close enough to be sure) - but it was clearly a frustration Kiba wasn’t used to, and he’d stubbornly leaned on Haimaru for balance and made his own way to the booth while leaving his wheelchair by the door.

“I can _walk,_ ” he’d snapped at Shino when Shino stuck too close, then given an irritated shake of his head and muttered an apology.

“I’m making sure no one steps on Akamaru,” Shino said. “He’s small and easy to miss.”

“You’re a shit liar, Shino.”

Defensive or not, I thought it was probably safer to leave him to it and focussed instead on demolishing the grilled squid, mushrooms, and assorted onion or beansprout garnishes from among the endless meat. The red victory pork, I noticed, was a prominent centrepiece; maybe Ito-san had been being honest about selling it from his fish stall to show support. Clearly there was _some_ seafood making it through Orochimaru’s attacks on the supply caravans else the restaurant wouldn’t have squid, so. Maybe?

Thankfully the conversation moved on to what had happened in the exam that they’d missed, and Kiba seemed to relax once it was clear that no one was making a big deal of either his partial deafness or his difficulty balancing. Ino took point on most of the retelling, and as tactful as she was about not highlighting the parts where Orochimaru impersonated Team Eight, it was impossible to gloss over entirely and put something of a downer on dinner.

“He could copy our kekkei genkai?” Shino asked, frowning.

Naruto shook his head unhappily. “None of us are trackers. Or those of who could track weren’t tracking, it was easy for him to pretend.”

“Unless you have paralysis bugs,” I added. “In which case, he copied those. Though they felt more like lightning jutsu than anything else.”

Shino gave a single shake of his head. “My current colony are chakra-drainers. Perhaps in the future when I can sustain multiple, but at the moment I’d only be causing them harm if I tried.”

“Speaking of multiple,” Ino said, turning to Sakura. “ _How_ do you still have dogs. I know your reserves, they haven’t got that much bigger since the academy. How aren’t you risking chakra exhaustion keeping this many summons around?”

For a second Sakura looked awkward, though I doubt anyone outside me or Naruto would have noticed. She hid it behind a teasing grin and shrugged in a way that blatantly said she had secrets and wasn’t going to share. She and Tsuki had been getting better at how long Tsuki could stay with us for, but it was still only a few hours at a time before they both started feeling the strain and I was surprised that Ino hadn’t worked out the dogs were Kakashi’s. I frowned at her consideringly and decided that she’d worked out at least some of it, but was fishing for more details that Sakura didn’t want to give her.

Did that mean she knew something about where Kakashi was? I’d asked Shikamaru because I knew him better and thought he was most likely to tell me. Should I have asked Ino instead?

Although, that was another thought. Keeping Tsuki around put a strain on both Sakura _and_ Tsuki, and though every other dog alternated days to give them a rest, Urushi had been with us since the preliminaries. I glanced down at him, subtly trying to check how he was doing, but he cocked his head back at me and didn’t seem to be any different from usual.

“Wait, they’re summons?” Kiba said. “Since when do you have summons? Since when do you summon _dogs_?”

I blinked at him. “You didn’t honestly think they were pets?” I asked, mystified. “I’m sure dog dogs are lovely, but way to insult someone. Obviously they’re summons.”

“The hell are you saying about nindogs, ass -”

“Nothing,” I backtracked. “I’m sure nindogs are fine -”

“ _Fine?_ You’re sure they’re - you know, I think I liked you more when you were a guy and thought you were too good to talk to anyone.”

I opened my mouth to backtrack further, then hesitated. Why? I wouldn’t let anyone else get away with saying that. He was being a dick, the least I’d normally do would scowl and pointedly ignore him, so why - oh.

I fought the urge to glance at either his scars or his wheelchair over by the door. It was stupid to want to treat him any more carefully because of them, but it was also basic empathy to see someone hurt and want to at least be mindful of it. People had probably been tiptoeing round him since he got out of hospital.

He probably hated it.

As previously stated, he was also being a dick.

“I,” I started cautiously, then gaining confidence when he tilted his head towards me almost in anticipation, “Have never been better than anyone in my _life_ , moron.”

I then refused to wince. It might have been gaining confidence, but as far as counter arguments went, it could have been better.

“I like that,” Shikamaru said, sitting up from his lazy slouch. “Can I have that in writing?”

I stuck my tongue out at him. “No. Confessions under duress aren’t trustworthy, it doesn’t count.”

“Oi, don’t back out now, Uchiha,” Kiba said. “Just because you couldn’t make it through the preliminaries and you know I totally would’ve.”

“As if, dog-breath,” Ino jeered, and with the relief that came from leaving a heavy subject behind and with all the grace and artistry of an elephant high dive team, the table descended into immaturity and chaos.

Which I did not take part in. Because I was better than that. Obviously.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sasuke: Classified information, yes, but. Minor treason?  
> Shikamaru: ... physically can't help as I don't know, but also, minor _treason_  
>  Sasuke: rude
> 
> The coffee almost certainly was not bugging anyone else, but I mentioned in a previous chapter that there wasn't any coffee in Konoha and later discovered that in canon, there is. Voila. (the retconned explanation is that Sasuke in her old life would not have been used to coffee coming in cans, which is how it's sold in Konoha, so she was looking in completely the wrong place and then just assumed it didn't exist)


	35. Chapter 35

Border wall, farms, hospital. Those were what we spent most of our d-ranks on, with occasional breaks to recover and resharpen thrown weapons from the training grounds. I didn’t like to say outright that the reason we were being sent after blunted and rusty kunai was because the genin corps were getting through an unholy amount and we couldn’t keep up supplies, but I can’t have been the only one to think it. The other main assignments were more obvious; the walls had to be checked for weaknesses, farms had to be both harvested and protected, the hospital suffered from most of Konoha’s healers being field medics and needed people to fill in the gaps. It was a remnant from when Tsunade was active, and though I could see the logic of it it meant that with so many ninja stationed out of the village the hospital was precariously understaffed. Even leaving aside the actual medical care that we didn’t have the training to help with, there was too much to do to keep everything running, and it felt like far too few of us to do it.

It was probably unfair of me to dislike the hospital on principle, but. It was white. And sterile. And needed constant cleaning, and stock checking, and most of the storage was in low-ceilinged underground rooms that were a bit darker and noticeably cooler than the rest of the world, and I didn’t like it.

Though it did make it easy to sneak off and visit Chouji on lunch breaks, even if we had to leave the dogs outside to do it.

The fifth morning in a row that we got assigned to hospital duty, I broke.

“Please,” I begged Iruka, abandoning any semblance of pride I had. “Any other mission. Look at Urushi. He has to sit outside and wait, he _hates_ sitting outside and waiting. You wouldn’t do that to him, would you?”

Iruka shook his head, pulling a sympathetic face but not giving in. He looked drawn, verging on the edge of exhausted, and he’d moved d-rank assignments to his classroom in the academy as a way to cope with the dual workload - he usually ran the mission desk when the academy was closed, not at the same time as it. We were early enough at the moment that none of the students were there just yet, but it made for an awkward experience if we had to interrupt him for additional missions during the day. We generally tried not to and just collected two or three scrolls at once, and today’s joyous offerings were a delightful selection of cleaning, waste disposal, and stocking even more field-kits with emergency first aid.

“I’m sorry, Sasuke. Everyone’s doing their bit at the moment, and this is what the village needs from you.”

I swallowed my thoughts on what the village could do with its needs. I wasn’t trying to shirk. I was just trying not to forget what sunlight looked like, that was all. Border wall and farms, remember, there were meant to be three main areas of missions. No one else had got stuck at the hospital for an entire week.

Naruto glanced over at me, and however quiet I was keeping about my internal rebellion, he clearly saw exactly what I was thinking.

“Ne,” he began, pasting on a cheesy grin that had Iruka reflexively rolling his eyes and bracing himself. “Ne, what if we did an extra one? These will take no time if I put the unstoppable Naruto army on them, believe it!”

Iruka folded his arms and raised an eyebrow. Naruto’s cheesy grin got cheesier and grinnier, and despite his attempts to look imposing and strict, Iruka’s amusement was leaking through. “You can’t use your clones for everything, Naruto,” he said, aiming for serious and barely making it.

“Yeah, but they’re awesome.”

He snorted at that, abandoning his teacher-pose entirely. “Maybe they are,” he allowed. Naruto’s grin settled briefly into something more genuinely happy before he leaned forwards, rocking on the balls of his feet like he was an excitable kid again.

“So what have you got for us? What amazing, heroic way are we going to save -”

“It has to still be at the hospital,” Iruka cautioned. “You can’t be too far away from your clones if they’re actively involved in a mission, you know that. However…” He shuffled through his scrolls, pulling one out from near the bottom of the pile and handing it out to me. “Here. One of the trees is growing too close to the windows out the back, it needs cutting back and training to grow the other direction. Should be right up your street, Sasuke.”

I blinked, then hesitantly took the scroll. “Thank you,” I said, eyeing him curiously. He was most people’s favorite teacher, and I was a lot less wary of him now that I’d stopped seeing everyone Konoha as automatically bad, but I’d never been close to him. If he knew I liked plants it was probably because Naruto told him. I wasn’t sure how I felt about that.

Not that I minded Naruto talking to people about me. Trees were hardly an exploitable weakness; it was more that I forgot that Naruto saw Iruka as a parent figure - older brother figure? - and as used I was to Sakura having family outside the team, it was jarring to remember that Naruto wasn’t only ours.

I shook myself, ashamed at the thought. It was _good_ that Naruto had family, and I could hardly justify being possessive given that I literally _lived_ with him. We shared a damn bed and I borrowed his jacket more than I wore my own, what else could I possibly want from him?

“Thank you,” I said again, stronger this time, and followed it with a nod that wasn’t quite the respectful bow that theoretically a sensei deserved, but was a lot more than I usually gave.

“You’re welcome,” Iruka said, almost but not entirely managing to hide his surprise. “Now shoo, I have a stack of papers to grade and exactly four minutes to do it in. And Naruto, if I get any reports of you using clones on missions I’m denying all knowledge and putting you in detention for a week.”

“Wha - I graduated!”

“A _week_.”

It was still playing on my mind while I was up the tree. Naruto wasn’t there - clones weren't _forbidden_ as such, but given that few genin could make reliable solid ones they had a stigma attached to them that was best avoided, and if he was keeping his clone usage on the down low it made sense for him to take the less visible jobs where he wouldn't be seen in two places at once. Sakura was though, standing below me to catch the branches I was cutting off. We'd decided against using her chainsaws; as efficient as they would be, they were also wickedly sharp and currently coated in take three of my updated paralysis poison, which was both a pain to distill and not much use against trees. Besides. The hand saw we'd borrowed from the d-rank tool shed was just as good. Slow, maybe, and maybe that was part of the reason I’d chosen it, but maybe I was just also being careful and taking my time to do things properly. I mean. Trees were delicate; if you cut the branch wrong the weight of it would tear off a slice of bark as it pulled away from the trunk, and if you did it badly enough you could end up killing the tree. It would be stupid to try and rush it.

Also it was warm, with just enough breeze to keep it from being muggy. Urushi was keeping watch while sprawled out on the ground with his fur covered in loose soil and dust from where he’d been rolling. Bisuke was somewhere, tracking Naruto as best he could when he wasn’t allowed inside, and Pakkun was presumably with Kakashi again. Either that or resting between summons; he was remarkably close-lipped about anything to do with Kakashi, and I honestly wasn’t sure how often he reported back.

“There’s not even that much threat in the village at the moment,” I argued, stripping the leaves and smaller twigs off the branch so that what was left could be cut for firewood. “They’ve tightened security so much, the only way for Orochimaru to get through to Konoha now is if he was here to begin with.”

“Which he was,” Sakura said. “That was exactly the problem.”

“Yes, in the _exam,_ but there’s no way he’s stayed in Konoha the entire time. Sound wouldn’t be running the war without him.” In the exam and long enough after to kill the Sound genin and declare the war officially started, but the point still stood. Orochimaru was the sort to personally infiltrate the Forest of Death and play mind games with people; that didn’t match with someone happy to delegate his years-in-the-making revenge plan to a jumped up minion with a bright idea. Or what I assumed was a revenge plan. I couldn’t see any other reason for him to be so focussed on Konoha, and I didn’t think the Byakugan counted given how easily he could’ve taken it without revealing himself.

Sakura seemed skeptical. “Is it worth the risk?” she asked. “Why do you want to move back into the Uchiha district anyway? I thought you didn’t mind staying with Naruto.”

“I don’t.” I frowned, moving over to the next branch and splitting my concentration between the saw and the water-hand I was using to brace myself against the tree with. Pushing and pulling with it was easy, but maintaining a constant pressure and using it to lean my weight on required a level of stability that I was still working on achieving. I couldn’t do with pure chakra alone, and I had a shimmering mass of water I’d borrowed from the river that I was using to strengthen it. “It’s not that I want to not stay with him, it’s that I don’t want to monopolise him all the time. He’s allowed to spend time with other people who aren’t me.”

“You’re not monopolising him. Has he said he wants you to go?”

“Well, no, but -”

“Why would you think he does?”

“No, I don’t. I just.” I chewed my lip, thinking how to phrase it that wouldn’t sound self-centered or insecure. “He was all happy after talking to Iruka. He hasn’t been bouncy like that in ages.”

“Bouncy?” Sakura repeated, grinning, and I wrinkled my nose at her.

“Bouncy,” I confirmed, sticking to my word choice. If anything, Naruto was the quietest and most serious of the three of us now; it was hard to remember how exaggeratedly obnoxious he’d been in the academy.

“You know he was partly doing it for effect to get the extra mission, right?” She hummed thoughtfully, then added, “And because I think that’s the politest you’ve ever been to Iruka-sensei, that would be enough to put him in a good mood by itself.”

“I can be polite,” I protested. “Also he wouldn’t manipulate Iruka. He likes Iruka.”

“He wasn’t manipulating him. They were just messing, Sasuke-chan, Iruka knew exactly what he was doing.”

Well. Maybe. But maybe it was still good for Naruto to have a chance to be goofy every now and then. “I could stay with you?” I suggested, switching back to the original topic. “If your parents wouldn’t mind.”

She snorted. “My dad would love you, no worries. You can stay if you want, but honestly, don’t be so worried about Naruto. He’d tell you if something was bothering him.”

“Just your dad?”

“Ah - sorry. My mum would too, but she’s stuck out of town until the travel restrictions are lifted. I warn you though, my dad’s loud. He likes sparkles. I think I broke his heart when I said I preferred punching people to pretty things.”

“Of course you prefer punching people,” I muttered. I also paused my sawing to squint at her and try to gauge by sight alone if her dad was pressuring her to be girly and if I should hate him for it. She seemed joking rather than bitter, and she probably wouldn’t appreciate me disliking her family, so. Maybe. “Punching people is what you do, you’re good at it.”

“I try,” she said, and raised an unimpressed eyebrow that said she’d noticed my reaction and it was entirely unnecessary. “Promise you’ll talk to Naruto before deciding he wants you to move out?”

“I’m not - moving out? No. Of course I'm not. I just want him to be happy, is all.” I also wanted to stay up the tree, but unfortunately I was on the last branch that needed cutting back, and Sakura was already braced below to catch it when it fell. I adjusted myself to put as little weight as possible on the water-arm - as useful as it was, it was also exhausting to keep it corporeal like this, and I was feeling the drain - and lined the saw up to cut. “We should do something silly,” I decided. “All three of us. Everything’s all heavy, I don’t like it. It’s my birthday soon, we should be ridiculous and leave the world to be stupid by itself for a day.”

She smiled at that, tilting her face up to me and nodding in agreement. “You’ll have to teach me what pass the parcel is.”

“Um.” Neither wrapping paper nor newspaper were things in Konoha. You could buy blank notebooks, but they were fairly expensive, and as much as I’d find it hilarious to tear apart an Icha Icha for its pages I doubted that would go down well. Also, what if they had pictures. Ew. No. “Um, you use… blankets. Or pillowcases. Pillowcases would be better. And sweets, lots of sweets.”

I didn’t notice the tunnel until I’d dropped down from the tree, running my hand over the bark and tracing the faint horizontal lines in it. It was a beech, with thin, smooth bark, and the raised markings were a natural sign of a healthy tree. The few vertical or curved lines near the base were not. I frowned as my fingers caught on them; they didn’t match up to any disease I knew of, and the lines looked like they were part of the bark rather than cuts made with a kunai or shuriken.

“Maybe it’s not a beech?” I asked Urushi, activating my sharingan to look at them closer. Sakura was dropping off the twigs and leaves to be broken down for compost while I collected the remaining branches and sawed them up for logs, but I didn’t think she’d mind the pause. If the tree _was_ sick, it was always better to catch it early.

The tree wasn’t sick. The markings were as old as it was, and they tugged on my memories, familiar from the dictionary I’d been building for Sakura. Seals. Not ones I could read in any detail, but I picked up the general concepts clearly enough.

_Secret,_ they said. _Hidden. Open, close. Identify._

And, underneath that, _Alarm._

I snatched my hand away, taking a hurried step back with my eyes wide and my heart racing. Urushi rolled immediately to his feet, crowding round my ankles with his ears straining and his hackles raised, and the hand I dropped to his shoulders to calm him was as much for my reassurance as his.

“It’s ok,” I said, keeping my voice low. “I was just startled. There’s no danger, I’m sorry.”

I hoped there was no danger. I hadn’t - I’d run my fingers over them, there was no way they’d activated. The alarm was almost certainly for people trying to force open the entrance, it wouldn’t be set off by someone _reading_ it. How could it know. There was no way it could know. Reading didn’t work like that, it didn’t know.

Secret entrance, on the roots of a tree with the seals so cleverly hidden that even with a sharingan I’d almost mistaken them for something else -

It could be ANBU. It could easily be ANBU. It was probably ANBU. If I was ANBU, I’d want a private tree-passage into the hospital so people didn’t see me bleed everywhere, it made _sense_ for it to be ANBU.

“It’s ok,” I told Urushi again, but I backed up a step further and decided to take a break from sawing duty. He didn’t seem particularly convinced, but he followed me away from the tree and stopped growling at it. He didn’t move away though and when my legs hit a bench and I instinctively sat on it, he parked himself between my ankles, sitting at a rigid alert with his attention fixed on the tree.

Even if it wasn’t ANBU, it wasn’t doing anything. I’d been up in the branches all morning. It was just a door, that’s all, and it might not even be that given how smooth and undisturbed the ground around the base of the tree seemed to be. I could look closer at the dirt to be sure, but I could also close my eyes, deactivate my sharingan - though not the dark-eyes genjutsu, which was an entirely irrational safety blanket but a comforting one all the same - and just. Not.

I already knew Danzo existed. The tree didn’t give me any new information. Nothing changed, there was no reason to freak out, and if Sakura came back and asked what was wrong there was nothing I could say to answer her so logically I couldn’t give her a reason to suspect anything was wrong. Which it wasn't. Because I wasn't freaking out. I was fine.

“It’s ok,” I promised Urushi for the third time, and deliberately measured my breathing to stop my heart from racing.

“I’m glad to hear it,” Orochimaru said.

I froze. My eyes snapped open, and all the air in my lungs turned cold and stuck in my throat.

The moment cost me, and by the time I’d got my wits together enough to think of kawarimi my window to do so had disappeared. Orochimaru was sat next to me on the bench; he reached round behind me to tap once on my right shoulder - I didn’t know why - before bringing his hand back to rest, heavy and chilling, over the back of my neck. It was enough that if I switched I’d take him with me, but not enough to hurt or hold me in place. Between my feet, Urushi was silent and unmoving, staring blankly forward in a way that neither looked nor felt natural. If I was careful, I could keep enough skin contact with him that when I twisted away from Orochimaru and -

Orochimaru’s grip tightened in warning. I abandoned my escape and went still.

“I’m curious though,” he continued, as though he hadn’t just wordlessly threatened me, “What’s ok? Because forgive me for saying, but I wouldn’t call your situation the best you’ve ever been in.”

No, I thought, only slightly hysterically. You’re not forgiven. Go away. Outloud, all I said was, “What did you do to Urushi?”

“Dogs are a pitiable summon to have,” he said, which answered very little except that he’d definitely done something. “I’m sure I could get you wolves if you’re attached, but you’d be magnificent with snakes.” I suppressed a twitch at the casual presumption that he’d be getting me anything at all. The offhandedness, as though it were a given and didn’t need to be discussed, the almost indulgent way he’d _let_ me have wolves, the idea that I could be magnificent with anything - _no._ “Based on your reactions, it’s the tree that’s ok, which clearly implies that it has reason not to be. And that’s the curious part, Sasuke-kun.” I didn’t look at him, but I could feel him turning to face himself more towards me. He moved his hand as he did it, a thoughtless readjustment to a more comfortable angle that brought his fingers curving forwards and resting on my pulse point.

There was nothing thoughtless about it. I had a sudden, disastrous urge to swallow, even though my mouth was so dry it was fifty fifty whether I’d cough or choke on the attempt.

“How did you know what was under the tree? You aren’t ANBU. It was an interesting possibility, but the lack of tattoo is an unfortunate giveaway.”

The lack of - shoulder. Swirl tattoo on an ANBU’s shoulder. Itachi’s uniform came with sleeves, I hadn’t even thought of it. It was a seal? It had to be a seal, how else would Orochimaru know I didn’t have it just by _tapping_ me.

How did Orochimaru know I’d ever pretended I did. Unless it was literally just the fact that I’d noticed the tree that made him think it, in which case overreacting would just let him know that he’d hit on a bigger secret and was exactly the worst thing I could do for myself.

“I never said I was,” I said cautiously.

He lifted his hand for a second to tug on a loose strand of hair, then returned it to my neck. “Your mother used to wear those pins, Weasel-kun.”

_Or_ the situation was bad enough that panic was an entirely reasonable reaction, and he knew all my secrets anyway so what was the point in - no. No, calm, think. He couldn’t - but Weasel-kun, ANBU Weasel, ANBU Weasel visiting the Kazekage in a weasel mask, had he seen me? Had Rasa told him? There was no way Rasa recognised anything from my mum - but I’d worn the pins then because I never thought I’d be a girl in public, and now I was and now I was wearing them and I hadn’t even _considered_ and a completely irrational part of me wanted to believe that Orochimaru was just guessing but if he wasn’t, if Rasa was betraying us all along if Rasa was already _dead_ and that had been Orochimaru I’d tried to cow into toeing the line -

“This much stress can’t be good for you,” Orochimaru said. “You’ll be happier in Sound, Sasuke-kun. Oh, it’s Sasuke-chan now, isn’t it?” He hummed thoughtfully, and I shifted instinctively away from him. It made his hand close on my throat, fingers now impossibly far forwards - not crushing, not hurting, almost gentle but inescapably _there_ with his knuckles brushing against the underside of my chin. “Not what I expected,” he continued, still terrifyingly calm. “But I’ve no objections to it. Have you considered surgery? Kabuto’s been looking forward to remaking you, I’m sure he wouldn’t mind.”

I didn’t answer that. I couldn’t, both because of the insistent pressure on my windpipe and because letting myself even acknowledge the question was a distraction I couldn’t afford. Even if it was gentle Orochimaru’s grip was merciless; the only direction I could move to try and get out of it was back, and he didn’t let up until I was firmly on the bench again with his arm over my shoulders and resting heavily against my chest.

Urushi was completely frozen throughout the whole thing. I didn’t know where Bisuke was. Or Sakura. If she came back while Orochimaru was here - should I try kawarimi anyway, just to get both of us away from her? Would he let me survive if I did? If I just went for it and screamed, would anyone in the hospital hear me? If I sat here and didn’t say anything, would he get bored and go away, or would he get bored and start trying to take my eyes again?

“I’m not going to Sound,” I blurted. It was typically defiant enough to buy time while my mind raced, focussed by the need to keep Orochimaru away from Sakura. He wouldn’t kill me for a kawarimi, he’d put too much effort into me - oh god - to waste it now. He might knock me unconscious, but as fast as his reactions were I was pretty sure I could switch us somewhere faster, though I’d only be able to do it once. Where, though; somewhere with other people would be my best shot at getting out of this in one piece but the only ninja I knew in Konoha at the moment were at the academy or in the hospital itself. Gate guards, or if I could get him to the patrols on the border wall, but could I reach that far? I needed to see where I was going to end up somewhere deliberate. Was there an angle I could see into the hospital, should I just land outside the front doors and hope?

“Don’t be difficult, Sasuke-chan. Where else would you go? We both know you have no love for Konoha, and I'm hardly going to let you be a missing nin.”

I closed my eyes, fighting back a strained whine. What the fuck was I meant to - how did - how many things was I meant to be _panicking_ about. I was one person. Half a person, I was still in the process of _becoming_ a whole damn person, what the hell did people have against letting me do it in _peace_. The barely controlled wave of fear I’d been riding threatened to swallow me whole, and I - couldn’t.

I pressed my eyes shut tightly enough to hurt, and clamped down on my reactions. Calm was an illusion. Rational thinking - who had time for that. People whose lives weren’t mine, that’s who. I didn’t want to know what Orochimaru had overheard. Was he guessing, did he have working knowledge of my plans, I didn’t care. Was I just that obvious that he’d picked it up from the few times I actually knew he was there? Great. Fantastic. Was he keeping tabs on me when I’d thought I was safe and wasn’t watching my words? Even better, we love a creepy stalker to add some variety to life. There was only so much I could be afraid of in one sitting, and I couldn’t do anything about it, so fuck it. _Fuck_ it. Ridiculously misplaced anger, my friend, I’ve _missed_ you and your reckless confidence, let’s fucking go.

“Why,” I asked flatly. “I’m not strong. I only have one arm. I don’t have a sharingan. Why did you decide to fixate on me.”

“I’m not convinced that’s true,” he said, and lifted his other hand to touch the scar he’d left under my eye. The dark-eyes genjutsu I still had running wavered but held, and I jerked my head away, ignoring the way it made his hold on me tighten again. He wasn’t actively stopping me breathing, it wasn’t important enough to matter. Warnings didn’t mean shit until you followed through. “Jiraiya couldn’t remove it?” he asked, dropping the topic of my eyes and reaching for my elbow instead. He turned it until his seal was visible, overriding my effort to get it back. “Of course he couldn’t. He’s an idiot at the best of times, souls are completely beyond him.”

I wasn’t going to rise. He wanted me to ask. I wasn’t going to ask.

He didn’t wait for me to.

“Yours is loose, by the way. I wondered when you said you didn’t feel killing intent, but Kabuto was kind enough to confirm it for me.”

“Why the fuck are you telling me.”

“Language, Sasuke-chan,” he chided, then went on as though I hadn’t interrupted. “You do feel it, of course. Everyone does, you just need a more direct approach than some. You’ve got… a faulty connection, shall we say. Someone killed you and didn’t quite reattach you right.” He lined his fingers up to match the seal, seemingly entirely focussed on it while he absently laid out secrets I’d buried so deep I’d forgotten I was meant to be keeping them. Not the killing intent, but the fact that I’d _died_ \- “Your brother, I suspect. His wouldn’t be the only sharingan that cheats death, and it was new when he used it on you, wasn’t it? Or parts of it were.” No. No, it wasn’t him, that’s not how his mangekyou works, go away. Go _away._ “You aren't bad for a first attempt, but you're not finished yet either; you’ve barely grown, not as much chakra as you should have, no kekkei genkai - well. None you admit to, but I appreciate the deception.” He lit his fingers with a faint blue glow and I tried again to pull my arm out of his reach with no success.

“Why are you _telling_ me.”

He finally looked up at me, yellow eyes intent and a disturbingly fascinated cast to his expression. “Because I could make you so much more, Sasuke-chan,” he said. “What I could learn from fixing you, what you could _be_ if your body and soul lined up and gave you the strength you were meant to have. And your eyes, your crowning glory, the _abilities_ they’ll grant you -” He slammed his hand into my elbow, driving his chakra down until it felt like he was scraping my bones with it. And I _could_ feel it, shockingly jarring as my brain struggled to understand how there was a limb there anymore to feel anything or why it was hurting; it ripped through me in jagged shards and my whole hand spasmed from the agony of it. I flinched, curling instinctively over it with a barely-stifled scream, and tasted blood from where I’d bitten through my lip. Orochimaru tugged the arm insistently back; everywhere he touched felt like knives, except hot _hot_ burning with fire in their wake, and I couldn’t focus enough to stop him laying it out and running his fingers over my wrist as he watched it twitch and cramp its way to wakefulness.

“I’ll make you perfect,” he promised, and all I could do was hold onto Urushi’s frozen form and wait desperately for it to end.

Orochimaru didn’t take me to Sound.

“We have time,” he said, like I was the one impatiently asking when I could go. Maybe he thought I was - he knew I wasn’t loyal to Konoha, he’d just healed my arm and offered me power beyond my wildest dreams, why _wouldn’t_ I want to go with him. No curse seal. No mention of hollowing me out and wearing me as a second skin, what the hell was I waiting for.

I’ll make you perfect, he promised. He said he’d fix me.

At least now I knew why I was so damn short. Would he give me the height my counterpart had? I mean, it was my life goal to be tall, wasn’t it? Give me his height, give me his chakra reserves and his ability to play with a-rank jutsu as a twelve year old when I could barely manage to keep my sharingan active for more than an hour at a time. He’d already fixed part of me, and that was just by driving a single fucking seal into my arm and shredding every nerve in it raw in the process, I could hardly claim to doubt him.

My chakra felt unbalanced again. I’d got too used to sending it through a water arm instead of a real one, and now I was overcompensating and flooding the hand with more chakra than it wanted to take. It flickered over my fingers. Tiny little sparks, like static shocks. They hurt, but less now than they had at first. I was ignoring them.

My other hand was resting on Urushi’s head, idly stroking over the tuft of longer fur between his ears. It felt stiff, almost spiky, and the skin beneath it was warm. He wasn’t moving any more than he’d done before, but his skin would be cold if he was dead.

Orochimaru was wrong. If my soul was misaligned, then Itachi hadn't done it. Maybe it could look that way from the outside, maybe I didn't have a better explanation, but Itachi hadn't done it. If Orochimaru expected the sharingan to have some mythical control over death itself, well, it didn't. He was wrong.

Not about everything. If I was strong, I could protect myself. Other Sasuke was strong, and he'd protected himself - he'd killed Orochimaru, even. He’d killed lots of people. I’d killed a pig in the academy and traded the pancake made from it for a sugared apricot from Chouji.

“I was meant to be done measuring myself against him,” I told Urushi, still trying to smooth down his fur. “You weren’t there, but it was this whole thing when I decided to be a girl. Boy me was meant to go away.” My voice came out strangely flat. I felt strangely flat, I couldn’t be bothered to add any tone to it. What stage was nothingness on the grief cycle? Good, bad, was I losing progress if I stayed here and decided I didn’t care?

I grit my teeth. “Coward,” I accused myself. Denial, bargaining, acceptance; I couldn’t remember all the stages but I knew those were out of my reach so I went for the only one left I could manage. “Boy me was an idiot. In what universe is a fucking _height_ boost worth handing myself over to, to creepy ninja Voldemort. I hate him. Them. I hate them both. Who electrocutes someone’s fucking hand without asking them, what kind of egotistical _prick_ looks at a person and thinks they have the right to fix them. What if they don’t want to be fixed. What if they don’t fucking _want -_ ” I had to break off to swallow, the words scraping painfully against my throat. It had gone thin and tight the way it did when you were on the verge of the painful kind of crying and I decided I hated it as well because crying was for other people and I _wasn’t doing that._

“My name is Uchiha Sasuke,” I bit out. “I like fish and dogs. My dislikes are literally everything else. My hobbies are screwing up and my dream is to never grow another inch in my fucking _life_ and if anyone doesn’t like it, they can piss off and leave me alone.”

Who cared about giving yourself time to heal, anyway. Being a full person wouldn’t save me. There wasn’t any point.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Canon Orochimaru: Has a character backstory driven by a fear of death and an obsessive fixation on immortality  
> Canon Orochimaru: Worked with Danzo on his own eyeball hoarding tendencies, almost certainly knows that Izanagi can undo death  
> Canon Orochimaru: Literal genius who could easily learn more jutsu than he’d ever be able to use, also known to invent, reengineer, or improve on existing jutsu to better suit his purposes rather than settling for what's already been made
> 
> Also canon Orochimaru: hi yes so the reason i want a sharingan is uhhhhhhhhhh to copy things from people  
> Also also canon Orochimaru: and because itachi beat me that one time, fuck that guy


	36. Chapter 36

“Sasuke-chan!” Sakura greeted. “I was thinking about what you said, for doing something silly all three of us, and I - Sasuke-chan?”

I was still sat on the bench, Urushi frozen between my knees and my hand mechanically stroking his head. My bad hand - now my newly-fixed, Orochimaru approved hand - was resting awkwardly in my lap, too unfamiliar to feel comfortable wherever I put it. The branches I’d been meant to be turning into firewood were where I’d left them, haphazardly stacked and not yet cut to size.

“Where’s Bisuke?” I asked.

“Tracking Naruto, I think,” Sakura said cautiously. “I haven’t seen him.”

“He should’ve gone with you.”

She paused, then shook her head. “Maybe, but I still haven’t seen him. What happened? What’s wrong with Urushi?”

I shrugged. “Don’t know.” He was still alive. Still warm. “Can Tsuki call Pakkun at any time, or does he have to be waiting for her signal?”

“She can call him. It just might take him longer to answer, is all.” She took the extra couple of steps towards the bench, but opted for a more defensible crouch rather than sitting next to me on it. Another time, I might’ve appreciated the effort, but now it just seemed pointless.

“Sasuke-chan,” she said, leaning forwards to try and look up into my face. I ignored her, keeping my head down and my gaze fixed on Urushi. “What’s going on?”

Of course it was pointless. She was a genin. On her way to being a chunin, but she shouldn’t have to worry about enemies in her own village, and she shouldn’t have to be responsible for someone who did.

“I need Kakashi,” I said, ignoring her question. “Can you call him?”

“Not until you answer me.”

That caused a flicker of annoyance, and I glanced over to her with the beginnings of a scowl. She should be better at picking up when things were out of her control and leave me to it, being good at hitting things didn’t make her good at everything. “Orochimaru fixed my hand,” I told her flatly, and balled it into a fist to demonstrate. A thread of chakra, and the hand lit up with blue-white sparks, dancing formlessly over my knuckles. “Jiraiya was right, fire and water wasn’t the key. Maybe souls aren’t that beyond him after all.”

“Orochimaru,” Sakura repeated. She paled, and when she looked down at Urushi again it was with wide eyes. “Is Naruto still in the storage room?”

“As far as I know,” I said. “Call Kakashi.”

“I - yes, let me just -” She was already reaching for her summoning scroll, and she trailed off as she bit her thumb for blood and smeared it along the back. “Tsuki,” she said, cutting off Tsuki’s enthusiastic hello. “I need you to pass a message onto Pakkun, then get Bisuke and Naruto and bring them back here. Naruto’s inside the hospital somewhere, probably in one of the underground areas.”

“Inside?” Tsuki queried. “But we’re not allowed inside the sick house.” She sniffed at Urushi, then took a step back, tail tucked in low as she looked up at Sakura uncertainly.

“Special circumstances,” Sakura said. “Tell Pakkun we need Kakashi.”

“But -”

“Now, Tsuki.”

With a final hesitant glance at Urushi, Tsuki unsummoned herself. Sakura counted out a full minute to give her time to reach Pakkun before summoning her again.

“I told him,” Tsuki said when she reappeared. “He’s talking to the big dog-man. I’ll find Puppy next?”

“Thank you,” Sakura said, nodding at her and smiling to soften the tension. It was a somewhat strained smile, and I waited for the curl of guilt that came from being the one to cause problems again, the one making everyone worry and bringing too many enemies down on them that they didn’t know how to cope with.

It didn’t come. I was just… not in the mood.

We waited in terse silence. The trees were in a quiet spot round the back of the hospital, and the sounds of the village felt distant and removed. It made sense; ROOT would hardly put their secret tunnel somewhere busy. It also made it easy to hear Naruto and Tsuki’s approach, despite how little noise they made.

“Puppy,” Tsuki announced, coming up behind him. “Bisuke’s not here. I’ll get Pakkun.” She unsummoned herself again, not even waiting for Sakura’s response, and I wondered vaguely if it was Urushi that had made her so agitated or if she was just picking up the general aura of unease.

Naruto moved towards us immediately, taking in the scene and looking to Sakura in question. She shrugged, a jerky movement that was halfway between helpless and frustrated. “Orochimaru healed her arm,” she said. “I don’t know what else.”

He turned to me instead, reaching for my shoulder, and I twisted back on instinct to stay out of his reach. His hand hovered for a second, stopped in place by my reaction, and I kept stroking Urushi and ignored it.

“Bastard -”

“Look,” I said. I lifted my left hand. “Sparkles.”

“Why did Orochimaru heal you?”

I didn’t want to answer that.

“Bastard, look at me.”

I didn’t want to do that either. The tree didn’t make that much sense, when you thought about it. Why have a secret entrance outside the hospital? Why not put it in one of the cellars? From here you’d still have to go round to a door, anyone could see you. And since when would ROOT nin be treated in the main hospital, anyway?

“ _Sasuke._ ”

I blinked, turning to him with a quizzical frown. Over his shoulder, I saw Sakura talking to Pakkun, and realised I hadn’t noticed him arrive. He didn’t didn’t look particularly happy - not that he ever looked overjoyed, he was rather deadpan for a pug - and Tsuki was keeping so close she was practically stepping on Sakura’s feet, though she was at least being quiet and unobtrusive about it.

“Why did Orochimaru heal you?” Naruto asked again.

“Who leaves a sharingan with someone who only has one arm?” I answered, distracted by trying to read Pakkun’s expression. I was spared Naruto’s reply to that when Pakkun noticed me staring, and trotted over with Sakura and Tsuki in tow.

“Bisuke and Shiba are in the summon realm,” he said without preamble. “Bisuke found me just after Tsuki did. Shiba’s hurt, but not badly.”

I hadn’t even realised Shiba was trailing us. I spared a brief moment to be glad they were both ok, then refocused. “Kakashi?” I pressed. 

“At least a day away, and not on a mission he can cancel.”

My fingers froze, digging into Urushi’s fur. “We’re his team,” I said, sharper than I intended. He wasn’t meant to be on a mission at all. He wasn’t meant to be a _day_ away, he was meant to be running night patrols and staying to keep us safe. 

“The village is at war,” Pakkun said simply. Perhaps I should have paid more attention to how carefully measured his tone was, no hint of whether he agreed or disagreed with what he was saying, but I didn’t. I just stared at him, wrong-footed enough to shake the strangely cold apathy that had held me since Orochimaru left. “Urushi should have unsummoned by now,” he continued, moving past his statement. “If something’s preventing him going home where he can heal -”

“Kakashi has to come,” I interrupted. “Pakkun, I need him.”

"There’s Jiraiya,” Sakura said, cutting into the conversation. “Kakashi left us with him for a reason, and if anyone would be able to face Orochimaru, it would be him.” I switched my disbelief to her, and she lifted her chin but didn’t waver in the face of it. “A foreign kage infiltrated the village,” she pointed out. “This is bigger than our team, Sasuke-chan.”

“So let someone bigger than our team deal with it,” I shot back. “The village can handle the infiltration. Kakashi can handle us.”

“He -” She paused, eyes flicking to Naruto. I didn’t follow her gaze, but she must’ve found the agreement she needed, because she turned back to me with renewed determination. “I’m not sure he can, Sasuke-chan.”

I knew it. I _knew_ it. I didn’t know why, or how, but all her talk of taking Jiraiya as a temporary teacher - it hadn’t fooled anyone. I wasn’t sure what showed on my face but I didn’t bother to hide it, only turning back to Urushi so I wouldn’t have to look at her for her betrayal.

“Sasuke-chan,” she said, voice carefully steady. “The stakes are too high. The dogs weren’t able to do anything against Orochimaru - he could’ve taken you, and no one would’ve even known where you went. Refusing to go to Jiraiya because he isn’t Kakashi is -”

“Stupid?” I filled in for her.

“It makes life unnecessarily dangerous,” she said instead. I snorted.

“At least I’m consistent.”

“Bastard,” Naruto cut in, and I felt a sudden flare of irritation at the thought that the two of them were trying to tag-team me.

“You think I’m being unreasonable,” I said flatly. “You think I’ve decided I hate Jiraiya because he’s a new person and I never like new people, you think this is just about Orochimaru and the only thing that matters is that Jiraiya can help.” I grit my teeth, fighting the urge to just spill everything and make them see - Orochimaru, sure, but what about the Hokage, what about Danzo, what about _any_ of them _-_ “You think I don’t _care_ that you’ve decided Kakashi isn’t good enough and you’re shutting him out.”

“It’s hard to miss that you do, actually,” Sakura said, her own frustration starting to show. She shook her head, taking a breath to regain her calm. “Can we just put Kakashi aside -”

“No. If I let go of him once you’ll make me do it again.”

“If Orochimaru kills you because you were too pigheaded to see that Kakashi can’t protect you, you’ll never do anything again,” she snapped. “Even if he _was_ a good teacher he wouldn’t be worth your life. Sasuke, I get that you attach to people, but we don’t have time for this.”

I bit my lip on my first response. First, second - I had a whole range of them, ready to spill out and accuse her of any number of failings I could hurt her with, and the only reason I didn’t say them was because of the tired voice in the back of my head that reminded me I wasn’t _doing_ that anymore. The pause was long enough and awkward enough for her to get a grip on her own temper, and it was at a much quieter volume that she moved on.

“We need to check in and report. Tsuki, Jiraiya should be -”

“I do have time for this,” I interrupted. My voice sounded strange to my ears, but I was balancing too many other things to care. “If I didn’t, Orochimaru’d’ve already killed me.”

“It doesn’t have to be death to be bad,” Naruto pointed out. I shrugged, leaning forwards to position Urushi as much as I could over my good arm, then remembered and redistributed his weight across both. It was nothing like carrying a statue, as I’d half expected it to be; though his skin and fur had less give than they should have they were a far cry from unyielding. More like someone who’d tensed their muscles and put too much gel in their hair than anything else, and his eyes were as sharply focussed as they’d ever been. Just. Not on anything.

“Tell Kakashi I need him,” I told Pakkun, ignoring the others. I could’ve asked Naruto which of the missions inside he’d already done and take whatever was left, but I could also not do that. He stood with me when I stood up, and I could’ve seen if he’d come with me and leave Sakura behind, but that felt unnecessarily cruel to both of them, so that was another thing I could also not do.

I did hesitate though, thinking of Pakkun, and I didn’t want to be the sort of person who lashed out and hurt other people when they were hurting, but - “Kakashi made you family,” I said, not looking back over my shoulder. “That’s what the dog contract means. He gave you everything he had.” I resettled Urushi, trying and failing to find a more comfortable way to hold him. “It’s not his fault you wanted more.”

If she said anything to that, I didn’t hear it; I just blinked my sharingan on, focussed on the edge of the treeline toward the Uchiha district, and left.

I didn’t mean to sleep. I hid Urushi in Itachi’s room - I wasn’t sure why, except that it was a place I knew no one went - and spent the afternoon on the rooftops of the Suna compound under several layers of henge and genjutsu. 

It made sense at the time. I knew the security and knew that I’d got past it before, and I also knew from the forest that I could hide from Karin’s chakra sense if I tried. I doubted anyone would be able to notice me if she couldn’t. I had a vague notion of trying to lure Gaara out like I’d inadvertently done the last time I’d broken in, if nothing else to ask if he was avoiding me on purpose or if Suna were somehow keeping him from me. I didn’t; even if it wasn’t too risky to summon him like that I needed to be afraid for him to pick up on it.

I wasn’t afraid. I wasn’t really anything. Tired, maybe.

I crouched in the same high corner he’d found me in before, staring down at a compound of people who were almost certainly enemies, and felt weirdly distanced from everything to do with them. My attempt to head off their betrayal, the way I’d cared about the invasion and thought it was my job to do something about it just because I knew it was going to happen - it seemed so small. Orochimaru had given me the perfect excuse to tell someone. I could claim that he’d let it slip in an attempt to goad me into reacting, I could lie about what exactly he’d said, there were any number of ways I could hide my own involvement. If I did that though… Would it achieve anything? He had to know what information he was giving me. Maybe he was trying to trace who I’d tell it to, track down how I’d known to impersonate an ANBU in the first place - or maybe it was a test to see exactly how weak my loyalty to Konoha was. Either way, the chances of me being able to _do_ something with my knowledge were slim. It hadn’t made a difference when I’d tried before.

I frowned, resettling myself to a new position to stop my ankles going numb, and idly sent chakra to my clenched fist to watch the sparks when it got there. If I concentrated, I could see how to smooth them out and form hand seals the usual way, but they came back as soon as I got distracted again.

No, it had made a difference. Orochimaru took Hinata before he’d confronted us in the forest, not after. The changes stemmed from my meeting Rasa - if nothing else I’d made him doubt that his ambush was as secret as he needed it to be, and he’d abandoned the invasion because of it. Driving him to war instead wasn’t what I’d meant to do but it was _something_.

“I think I’d rather it wasn’t,” I muttered. It took a while to cycle my chakra through to fire, but when I did, the results were the same; as soon as it reached my left hand it wanted to flicker out of my control and collect like static in my palm. Hot static. Not painfully, and it didn’t leave any marks on my skin, but. Hot. “Actions having consequences sounds like a problem for someone else. I don’t think I like that it happens to me.”

Urushi was where I’d left him, tucked between Itachi’s dresser and the wall. I tugged him out carefully so as not to dispel the genjutsu and sat next to him, pulling my knees up so that the moonlight through the window didn’t reach my feet. If anyone was looking for me, I didn’t see them, but I’d stayed out later than I meant to before coming home. It was entirely possible I’d missed them.

“I should get the futon out,” I said, tipping my head back against the wall. “Or eat something. I don’t think I have any food though, I took it all to Naruto’s.” I tried to remember if I’d left anything, got as far as _probably tea_ , and gave up. “I’ll eat something in the morning,” I compromised. “And check the timer seals for the fish. They’ll be fine for another night.”

The floor wasn’t that comfortable, but I didn’t particularly want to move. Or sleep. I was tired, but not that sort of tired, and all I wanted to do was close my eyes to rest them from the dryness that came with overusing sharingan-illusions, not think about anything, and wait for the world to sort itself out without me.

I didn’t mean to sleep.

I woke up to a hand on my head, startling into wakefulness and fighting the instinctive urge to tense up and hold my breath. It took me barely a second to be aware of my situation; somehow I’d ended up curled on my side, nestled in against Urushi in a way that would make it difficult to reach my weapons without giving my attacker time to respond. It was still night, though I couldn’t tell what time exactly, and the slight chill suggested that someone had opened a window for just long enough to drop through it and into the room. They were leaning over me, too close for me to risk opening my eyes, but I could tell they were either kneeling or crouching and it put them in a weaker position to -

“ _Kakashi,_ ” I breathed, pushing myself up on my arms and scrambling to a sitting position. I flicked my sharingan on, dark-eyes falling over it automatically, and though I checked for obvious henge tells on instinct I already knew it was him. “You’re here. You _came_.”

He let his hand drop, rocking back on his heels. His headband was pushed up, and his usually lazy expression had been replaced by a familiar watchful blankness. He didn’t show any signs of exertion, but I could see the wear and sweat on his clothes, and there were faint marks on his flak jacket and shoes that said he’d been running through the rain. There hadn’t been any around Konoha for at least two days - wherever he’d run from, it wasn’t close.

“Where are the others?” he asked, and I paused my attempts to work out how far he’d come in favour of answering him.

“I don’t know.” And, though he didn’t do anything so overt as frown at me, I headed off the next question: “We had an argument, that’s all. Nothing’s wrong with them.”

“You shouldn’t be alone. What happened?”

 _They thought you’d abandoned us but they were wrong._ The thought was accompanied by a combination of relief and the particular satisfaction that comes with being proven right, but he wasn’t asking about that. “Sakura and I were doing a d-rank outside the hospital,” I said, falling into the familiar rhythm of a mission report. “We were behind the eastern buildings, not visible from the street. Urushi was with us but otherwise we were alone; Bisuke was tracking Naruto. I don't know where Shiba was. Sakura left on an errand, and Orochimaru approached me. He -” I faltered, looking over at Urushi at not sure how to explain. “He did something to the dogs. I'm not sure what, I could see or hear any sign of a jutsu when he got Urushi. Pakkun said Shiba and Bisuke unsummoned themselves to escape it, but Urushi couldn’t. His condition seems stable, but…” I paused, waiting for Kakashi to say something. He didn’t. I took a breath, and continued.

“Orochimaru implied that he’d been watching me. He didn’t say how he was able to get in and out of the village, but he hinted that the Kazekage was an ally. And - Kabuto.” Would that be enough to identify him? Were there multiple Kabutos in the village? I couldn’t remember his first name. “The genin, Orochimaru said he was one of his. He was satisfied that Jiraiya hadn’t been able to remove the seal on my arm, and removed it himself without giving me an option to refuse.” My mouth was dry, and it was an effort not to swallow. I was being - technically - entirely truthful in my recounting, and if I could have dumped everything on Kakashi verbatim I would’ve done, but there were still too many details I couldn’t let him know. Even mentioning the Kazekage felt like a risk, but Suna’s betrayal was too important for me not to take it. “When he left, it was on the understanding that he could come back at any time, and I think… I’m almost certain that he knows I activated my eyes and is waiting for a more convenient opportunity to take them. Me. He isn’t trying to just steal the sharingan anymore, he wants me as well.”

He was silent after I’d finished. There were obvious questions - why approach at all if he hadn’t planned to kidnap me just then, why change from just wanting my eyes to wanting me, why heal my arm - but what he finally asked was, “What did you argue about?”

I blinked. “With Naruto and Sakura?” I clarified. “Um, they thought I should go to Jiraiya.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“Because I -” I stopped. It sounded childish, and I backtracked to justify it. “They knew Orochimaru had been there, I assumed they’d make the village aware of the security breach. And if Orochimaru was going to do something to me today he’d’ve already done it, I wasn’t in danger by myself. And because…” My voice went small. “He isn't you.”

If he had a reaction to that he didn’t show it, expression rigidly controlled. I looked away, knowing exactly what he must be thinking, but without explaining everything else I couldn’t make him see how much it mattered that I didn’t replace him with someone else.

Except apparently I didn’t know what he was thinking, because his next question was, “Did Orochimaru give you reason to doubt Jiraiya?”

I shook my head, confused.

“Did he tell you specifically to call me?”

“No?”

“Could he have known that that’s what you would do even without being instructed?”

“I don’t take instructions from people who threaten me,” I half-said half-snapped, unsettled both by his questions and the weirdly professional way he was phrasing them. But, if I was honest… “Maybe,” I admitted. It depended when he was listening, but if he _had_ overheard us disagreeing about whether we should take Jiraiya as a sensei or not, and if that had been part of why he’d approached me when he did - my blood ran cold. “He wanted you to come.” Kakashi was one of the village’s best ninja, and if I put aside my own crisis and stepped back to think of the damn _war_ we were all in, then of course it was obvious that he’d been reassigned. Running night patrols - don’t be so stupid _._ Why had I ever - _god._

I pressed my eyes shut against the bitter idiocy of it all. “Sharingan no Kakashi never abandons a teammate,” I said hoarsely. “Even if they’re a dumb genin who can’t see they’re in a trap that’s nothing to do with them. I made you throw your mission.”

Another pause, another heavy silence, and I wasn’t sure if I hated it more or hated me. I’d been so concerned with myself that the only risk I’d seen was Orochimaru making the village doubt my loyalty. I’d been so caught up in the fact that I didn’t _care_ about the village that I’d forgotten that other people did. It might not be my job to single handedly stop the war with the benefit of shaky and unreliable foreknowledge, but at the very least it could be my job not to interfere and get other people killed.

Kakashi shifted his weight. “Don’t worry about the mission. My choices aren’t your responsibility, and I’m not that easy to manipulate.”

“But -”

“And,” he continued over me, his voice turning sharper. “Don’t make the mistake of assuming people only do things for one reason. It may have been a trap. Whether it was or wasn’t, it was certainly to do with you, and in response to that, your priority should have been to go to Jiraiya.”

I shrank back. I got it. I felt miserable, and behind that, the beginnings of resentful. Nothing I did was objectively wrong. Jiraiya, maybe, but he still wasn’t our teacher. Kakashi never _said_ he was out of reach and shouldn’t be contacted, how could it be my fault for wanting my sensei when someone had casually choked me, talked about remaking me like I wasn’t even a person, threatened me with nowhere to hide even if I left the village and went on the run - if I was still a puppy like Pakkun said, why was no one allowing me to act like one?

I was still looking down so I didn’t see Kakashi reach for me, but I felt his hand on my head again and shook it off. “Urushi’s hurt,” I told the floor. “You need to help him.”

“I -” He stopped, changed his mind about what he was going to say, then started again. “Have you changed your clothes?” 

“No.”

“Can I check you for tracking devices?”

“I did earlier. I couldn’t find any.” I made a frustrated sound, then amended, “I can’t see the back of my neck, there could be a seal there.” There wasn’t on my shoulder, where he’d tapped it looking for the ANBU seal, but he could easily have put one on my neck under the guise of holding me in place, and I turned around and lifted my hair so Kakashi could see. He ran his fingers over it lightly, a faint tingling against my skin that I assumed was his chakra, and then up through my hair to check my scalp.

“Clean,” he said, but though he lowered his hand he seemed reluctant to move away. “Why don’t you want to go to Jiraiya?”

“I told you. He’s not you.” He was quiet, and though I didn’t mean to, I kept talking. “The others want him to be our new sensei.”

“I know.”

“You _know?_ ” I turned to him, blinking in surprise. “If you know, then why -”

“Jiraiya will make a good sensei,” he said, meeting my eyes only briefly before shifting his gaze to Urushi. At some point he’d slipped his headband down, but now he lifted it again and moved to kneel in front of him, tilting his head and frowning as he studied him with the sharingan. “Don’t be so quick to dismiss him, he’s a lot more than he lets people see.”

“But he’s -” _not you._

I stopped.

I’d thought at the time that it was suspiciously convenient how Pakkun’s too-slow jog had taken us past the baths. And how he’d not interfered as we tried to track Jiraiya down, almost as though he knew it was a test, and how quiet he’d kept whenever Kakashi came up in conversation.

“You’re trying to get rid of us.” It didn’t line up. It _couldn’t_ line up, how could Kakashi care enough to come now, but at the same time dump us on someone else and not even - “You’re trying to push us into getting rid of you,” I corrected, leaning back as though trying subconsciously to distance myself from the conversation.

“There’s a difference between being able to kill people and being able to teach them,” Kakashi said. He was still focussed on Urushi, almost _too_ focussed on Urushi, but the tenseness he held himself with was entirely secondary to the _bullshit_ he was spouting and I ignored it. “You’ll be better with Jiraiya. All three of you will, but you in particular, Sasuke. You need someone you can rely on.”

“I thought I could rely on you,” I spat, then shook my head and regained my grip on my temper. “I _can_ rely on you. I don’t need anyone else.”

“You’ll be better with Jiraiya,” he repeated. He flashed through a few hand seals, then tried again and sat back on his heels when nothing happened. “Pakkun said Urushi had been asking for human food.”

“Don’t change the subject -”

“Did you give him blood?”

“I - what?” 

He turned to me, the forced-calm tone of his voice at odds with the way he was blatantly avoiding the other half of the conversation. “Something’s anchoring him here. It’s not me. Food would do part of it, but not enough to hold him this tightly.”

I went to deny it, then glanced down at my hand, remembering. “I scraped my palm on a wall,” I said hesitantly. “But it was a tiny bit, he just licked it.”

It was enough, apparently, for Kakashi to suppress a frown and shift himself more fully to face me. “A tiny bit might be enough. Copy these, and think of Urushi.”

And then go back to the part where you kicked us to the curb and hadn’t been bothered to tell us, I thought mulishly, but for Urushi I bit my tongue. The hand seals were straight forward, and thankfully the chakra for it was straight yin and yang, no water or fire - it wasn’t easy to channel it through my left hand but it didn’t produce as many sparks as elemental chakra would.

I pressed the last seal flat on the floor, mimicking Kakashi, and though I held my breath and braced myself I didn’t actually feel anything. No sudden drain on my reserves, no existing drain cutting off - nothing. Just the faintest flare of smoke against my side as Urushi disappeared.

“That’s it?” I asked, staring at the empty space and feeling oddly cheated.

“The jutsu won’t follow him to the summon realm,” Kakashi confirmed, already shifting his weight back to stand up. “He’ll need a break before being called again - though if Orochimaru knows techniques that work against summons, it might be wiser to ask Jiraiya for a toad. Snakes are stronger than dogs.”

“They’re stronger than toads as well,” I said dumbly, still staring as though Urushi would come back, before my brain caught up to the fact that he was walking away. “Wait. Kakashi - _wait._ ”

He didn’t, just glanced back at me over his shoulder and then looked forward again, reaching for the window to open it. I scrambled after him, grabbing his sleeve with my chakra arm when my physical ones were too short. “Wait,” I repeated, digging my heels in. “Don’t go. Kakashi, please.”

He stopped. From this angle, I couldn’t see his face, but his head was tilted forwards. “Jiraiya will be better for you,” he said, stubbornly, woodenly. “He’s a better teacher, he can help you understand -”

“I don’t _care_ about that stuff. I care about you.” I caught up the extra two steps and replaced chakra fingers with real ones, winding them into the fabric of his shirt and refusing to let him go. “I thought those who abandoned their teammates were less than trash.” I thought Kakashi’s commitment to his team was trustworthy. I thought _Kakashi_ was trustworthy, I thought I knew him - but if it wasn’t, if he wasn’t, if I didn’t, then what?

He’d never been there. Wasn’t that the problem? He supervised d-ranks from across the village. He took himself off and ran the mission alone in Wave, he pushed us to Asuma every chance he got. He left us with the dogs and went to fight in a war rather than stay when we needed him. Where did I get the idea - was it because of the story?

No. No, it wasn’t, it couldn’t have been. He ran the mission alone in Wave for _us,_ to protect us; he taught us more than canon-Sasuke’s Kakashi ever taught him, he _made_ me a jutsu. And Tsuki, and he was here now, wasn’t he? He came back, so why was he going -

But if it was the story, the insidious voice said, then the Kakashi who always went back for his team would be a lie, and the Kakashi that was leaving now would be the truth. So many people were different in so many ways; hadn’t I been thinking earlier that my Naruto was so much quieter and more serious than the obnoxious loudmouth he’d used to be? And if Naruto was different and Kakashi was different, if I couldn’t rely on even Kakashi to keep me safe, then -

 _This is nothing to do with Itachi,_ I thought with a flash of anger, and dug my fingers in further to Kakashi’s arm. “Those who abandon their teammates are less than trash,” I said again, stronger and with an edge of gritted teeth. “You taught me that, you don’t get to turn around and ignore it when it doesn’t suit you anymore.”

“I’m not ignoring it,” he said quietly. _Defeatedly_ , and how dare he. How _dare_ he. “I’m just accepting something I should’ve already known.”

“ _Fuck_ your acceptance,” I snarled. “You don’t get to - this isn’t something you have to accept. This is something you’re _choosing_. All the options open to you and you’re choosing the one that hurts me and _you don’t get to do that._ ”

“I’m choosing the one that helps you.” He made a frustrated sound of his own, his blankness finally cracking. “I should never have been given a team in the first place, I’m just fixing a mistake.”

“A mis - you piece of - _move_.” I pushed at his side, jabbing in with my elbow to try and force him to step back. When that didn’t work I moved round in front of him instead, bodily putting myself between him and his way out, and glared up at him. “You’re a shit teacher,” I accused him. “You don’t make sense and you leave all the hard work to other people and you pull stupid crap like this and you’re _shit._ ”

“Believe me,” he said tightly, “I’m aware.”

“But you’re also _my_ teacher and I don’t care if you’re happy to be less than trash and, and fucking _wallow_ in how unfair everything is and how your life sucks, that’s not how it works and if I’m not allowed to do that then you aren’t and you can’t -” I broke off, my breaths getting too ragged to fit between my words, and tried unsuccessfully to shove him back into the room. “I won’t let you,” I finished. “You can’t abandon me because I won’t abandon you. I won’t _let_ you.”

He stared back at me, both eyes wide and headband still pushed up from earlier, and I set my jaw and scowled back.

“Why?”

I scowled harder. “Because you’re an idiot. You thought I’d want to get rid of you because you screwed up. Who _does_ that. _Ass_ people. You’re an ass.” I stepped forward, this time pressing my shoulder against his stomach and using the wall behind me as leverage to try to get him to move. It still didn’t work, but he did lift his hands and hold my upper arms. Not hard enough to stop me pushing, but almost uncertainly, like he didn’t know what I was doing and couldn’t work out how to make me stop.

Dick. It was pissing obvious what I was doing, I was trying to get him away from the window so he wouldn’t run away.

“I have to get back to my mission.”

“You said it was under control.”

“I assumed I wouldn’t be long.”

I growled wordlessly and gave up on pushing, going instead for a headbutt and aiming purposefully for his solar plexus to make it hurt. “Fine,” I bit out. “I’m coming with you then.”

“Sasuke -”

“Orochimaru can get in the village any time. It’s not safe. I don’t want him to remake me, you don’t want to stay here with me, we both go on your mission. It’s _fine._ ” I emphasised that with a second headbutt and this time he caught me, his palm surprisingly warm against my forehead and his other hand curving up round the back of my head to keep me from drawing back for another attempt.

“Sasuke, stop.”

“No.”

“What about Naruto and Sakura?”

“What about them?” His fingers moved up into my hairline, threading through my fringe and pushing it out of my face. I made an annoyed sound when they caught on a knot and turned my head to a better angle. “They can come too, if they want,” I relented. “Or they can stay with the coward man. They like the coward man.”

“The _coward_ man?”

His fingers ran out of hair and he brought them back to the front, carding through again and being careful this time to avoid tangles. “Coward man,” I agreed, temper warily subsiding now that he wasn’t trying to leave. “It’s Jiraiya. Tsuki named him.” I frowned at that, a thought occurring to me. “Why did you give Sakura Tsuki if you didn’t want to stay?”

He took a while to answer. It was long enough that I’d let the tension all but drain out of me, the stress of the day combining with the soothing motion of his hand over my head and reminding me that I was tired and had barely slept.

“It didn’t seem fair to the dogs,” he said. His voice was quiet. Distracted, maybe. “No one else has their contract.”

I wrinkled my nose, trying to work through that, then gave it up as something for morning-me to handle and focussed instead on subtly leaning all my weight on Kakashi until he’d overbalance backwards and not be able to go.

He stiffened suddenly, his hand freezing in my hair. I blinked as I looked up, frowning questioningly at him as he stepped back and bit his thumb.

“Pakkun,” he said, as soon as he’d finished the summoning and the pug had appeared. “What -”

“Call Urushi,” Pakkun interrupted.

“He needs to heal. The damage from the jutsu -”

“He needs to get out of the summon world. Call him. _Now._ ”

Kakashi cursed, reaching for his scroll again. I hovered, wanting to ask what was wrong but able to see that both of them were too focussed for questions. Kakashi flew through the seals, slamming his hand into the back of the scroll - and nothing. Pakkun growled, head swinging round to fix on me.

“How much did you feed him?” he demanded.

“Some? I don’t know, just bits -”

“Blood,” Kakashi said. “She cut her hand, he got it from that.”

“ _Puppies,_ ” Pakkun huffed with a violent shake of his head. He seemed to sway for a second, shifting his weight from foot to foot with his head cocked and listening to something we couldn’t hear. “Pup,” he said, turning to me, but Kakashi moved to block him.

“There isn’t time for a contract,” he said.

Pakkun growled, side stepping him. “Then do it without.”

“Do what without a contract?” I asked, looking between them. “What happened to Urushi?”

Pakkun was the one to answer. “You tied him to the human realm,” he said bluntly. “The summon realm is killing him. Call him back, or he dies.”

I blanched. My hands twitched, already moving to the first seal I’d seen Kakashi and Sakura use countless times before. Kakakshi caught them, holding them still.

“Wait,” he instructed tightly, the expression on his face doing very little to hide how much he didn't like the situation. I could practically see him making and discarding alternative plans, but it was barely a few seconds later that he cursed under his breath and accepted it. “No contract means no protection,” he said, holding my gaze to make me understand. “Be careful, stay close. Do it with me.”

“Do it _fast_ ,” Pakkun added. I nodded to both of them and reached for a shuriken - my teeth were too blunt to draw blood by themselves. Kakashi led me through the seals like he’d done before; I subconsciously noted the differences between these to summon Urushi and the earlier ones I’d done to unsummon him, and slammed my bloody hand on the floor.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _Day 1 of Kakashi pestering Pakkun for puppy updates:_ Sasuke’s a girl? Time to over analyse everything I’ve ever said to her and conclude she hates me.  
>  _Day 4:_ Naruto doesn’t think I’m a banana. Why would I be a banana. What is the significance of banana, and does it mean he hates me.  
>  _Day 7:_ Jiraiya’s been deliberately pissing Naruto off in training for days now and he hasn’t sicced the kyuubi on him once. Naruto definitely hates me.  
>  _Day lost count:_ Do I think Sakura’s too blunt for seals because I’m a bad teacher who hinders her progress or do I think she’s too blunt for seals because she charges things head on and favours strength over subtlety: a dissertation  
>  _Day several after that:_ Sakura thinks I can't handle the team. Sakura is correct. Sakura hates me.  
>  _The same day as that, but now at two in the morning:_ Sasuke… doesn’t hate me? She makes no _sense_


	37. Chapter 37

It felt like flying. Like drowning, if you could drown in a sky and laugh through it. I was light headed, giddy; I was diving through a river made of glowing threads, and unspooling myself to weave among them as I went. Every part of me that connected to it felt ridiculously, painfully alive, fizzing against my skin, skittering over me in bursts of colour or blasting through me and leaving ice crystals in its wake. I stretched forwards through the endless everything and when I reached my limit I’d covered such a small part that I started taking myself apart to go further.

White chakra stopped me. It curved over me in an immovable barrier, and I flattened myself to the edges and tried to search for cracks to get past it. There were none. Lightning crackled from it, corralling me into place; I fought it, unravelling as fast as it built me back up, but I couldn’t get free. Slowly, achingly, it herded me back and surrounded me until there was no space left to escape, and when it had done that it went further, twisting itself so tightly around me that it forced me together into a single piece.

_Urushi,_ it said. _Urushi._

Well. Ok, if that’s what it wanted. I thought of his fur, warm under my fingers; I thought of the weight of him curled up on the end of the bed. The way it felt when he leant back against my shins, the roughness of his tongue as he licked my face - beyond the lightning barrier, some of the threads started to swell. If we were in a river, then it forked down the new path they laid out, flaring almost painfully bright to show me the way. With the current tugging me towards him and the threads leading me where I needed to go, I went.

_No,_ the lightning insisted, pulling me closer again.

“Urushi,” I insisted back, straining against it as I tried to follow the threads. Escaping it was as impossible as it was before, except this time the lightning wasn’t just holding me. It dragged me back - or sideways, or down, directions didn’t mean much when you had nothing to compare them to - out of the chakra that surrounded us, away from the life and the light and all the myriad possibilities collapsing around us and no matter how desperately I reached for them the threads snapped one by one -

When it stopped, I was in an empty place. Dark, but a strange kind of grey-dark, as though everything was visible even though there was no light. Too quiet. No heartbeat, no breathing; no chakra. No lightning. The bubbling energy of the threads drained out of me, and without it to distract me I was left with the horrible realisation that I was alone.

“Kakashi?”

No answer.

“Urushi?”

No answer.

Should I walk? There was nothing to indicate a direction. If I walked, something told me I’d walk for a long time. I flicked my sharingan on to check -

“ _Kakashi._ ” He was in front of me, hands on my shoulders, mouthing my name and I was so damn _relieved_ that it didn’t register at first that I couldn’t feel or hear him. “Where are we? Where were we?”

He frowned. He didn’t let go of me, but took a hand off my shoulder and switched to mission sign language, exaggerating each movement so the meaning was still clear with one hand.

_Summons now. Between before._

I blinked, then looked around at the blank nothingness again. “I thought the summon realm would have more stuff in it.”

He waved to get my attention, then signed a word I didn’t recognise. He repeated it, adding _partner summon_ at the end.

“Urushi? He was up in the - um, the between.”

_Here,_ Kakashi signed, and I shook my head.

“No. He’s not here. He can’t be here, he’s alive and this is -” I stumbled over the words. What? This is what?

_Here,_ Kakashi repeated, moving in front of me again when I didn’t immediately respond. He tried to pick my hand up but he passed through it as though he didn’t exist - as though _I_ didn’t exist - and when his grip tightened on my shoulder in worry I couldn’t feel that either. His eyes flicked to the side, and he said something to someone I couldn’t see; if his mask wasn’t in the way I could have tried to read it but as it was I got nothing.

“We shouldn’t be here. Kakashi, we have to go.”

He looked back at me, and shook his head. _Down,_ he signed, making a motion to press on my shoulder.

“Kakashi, we have to -”

_Down._

I bit my lip, but knelt down, keeping my gaze fixed on him. He held his hand out and I copied him, reaching out blindly through the air. I almost startled when my fingers brushed against something, then _did_ startle as Urushi appeared in front of me, lying on his side and thumping his tail in a weak but steady rhythm against the ground.

“Urushi,” I breathed, gripping onto him on instinct. He whined, lifting his head towards me - I heard it. I _heard_ it, and his tail, the blood in my ears, all the faint background static of existence. And words; Kakashi’s words. He was standing rigidly in front of us and speaking to someone I couldn’t see.

“ - got them both,” he was saying, one hand on my shoulder and the other on Urushi’s side. He lifted the hand off Urushi just long enough to sign at me - _with me, stay with me_ \- but didn’t stop talking as he did. “I need you to pull us. Sasuke got caught in the barrier, I thought she hadn’t made it through -”

I stilled, not sure I was meant to hear that, but the world dissolved in a flash of electric white before I could say anything. It was the same lightning that had pulled me out of the - the between? The barrier? - but so obviously Kakashi that it seemed impossible I hadn’t recognised it before. This time though he stuck closer, almost smothering us; I caught the barest glimpse of the glowing threads, saw one of them pulse white and stretch up, dragging us forward and out - and reality returned in a heavy rush of physical form.

I staggered. Itachi’s bedroom was both much darker than the chakra river and much brighter than the grey place, and far, far louder than both. Pakkun’s nails against the floor, the slight breeze outside the window, Urushi pushing himself to his feet and crowding close with a happy whuff, all of it. Just. _Sound._

“Look at me,” Kakashi demanded, grabbing my chin and turning my head towards him in case I couldn’t hear. I blinked and looked. The white chakra was gone, but his sharingan was still open, darting over my face in jerky movements.

“I’m good,” I promised him. “All here. Still me.” I even flared my chakra to demonstrate, barely enough to power a jutsu but enough for him to feel it. He held my gaze for a moment longer then nodded, letting me go and moving back to give me space.

Not that I had space for long. Urushi pushed himself under my arm, standing up with his paws on my chest until I slid down the wall to the floor to hug him properly. He didn’t seem hurt - if anything, he seemed to be _more_ lively rather than less, ears up and eyes bright as he climbed over me. I grinned at him, putting aside the last of my dazed reaction to the summoning, and turned to Kakashi and Pakkun. “Is that it? Did it work?”

“It worked,” Kakashi agreed. In contrast to me and Urushi, he looked exhausted, slumping back and pulling his headband down over his eye. The questions I’d been going to ask - is that how summoning always was, what was the grey place and why did I feel like I knew it, what did he mean _caught in the barrier and hadn’t made it through_ \- died in my mouth as I hesitated, torn between wanting to know and wanting to give him chance to recover.

Pakkun, on the other hand, did not hesitate. He marched up to us and delivered an angry kick with both back legs to Urushi’s thigh. I doubted it hurt much - he was less than half Urushi’s size - but his scowl more than made up for it. “Don’t take advantage of the puppies not knowing better,” he said, glaring up at Urushi. “They’re hard enough to raise right as it is.”

“It’s not his fault,” I protested automatically. “I was the one who fed him.”

Pakkun transferred his scowl to me. “It was entirely his fault. Don’t make excuses for people. The food wasn’t even the problem, it’s just an energy boost.” His lip curled in disgust and he stamped his feet like he wanted to kick someone again. “Except when it’s in the mouth of a weak-willed _idiot_ of a dog, then it’s an addictive, self-destructive _high_.”

Urushi barked, lifting his head from where he was sprawled across my lap and flattening his ears back against his skull.

“That was exactly what you did, and when that wasn’t enough you went for the damn blood for more -”

Urushi cut him off with another bark, louder this time and trailing off into a plaintive whine. He levered himself to his feet, backing up until he was pressed against my chest with his tail tucked in and twitching agitatedly in place. When he didn’t get the response he wanted he whined again and turned to Kakashi, looking between him and Pakkun with the stubborn insistence of someone who didn’t think they were wrong.

I desperately wanted to ask what he was saying. I didn’t, but it must’ve shown on my face; Pakkun caught my eye, then shook his head, his expression gentling. A bit. He still looked frustrated. “Leave it, Pup,” he advised. “Sometimes other people do stupid things too. You’ve enough trouble without borrowing more.”

I wrinkled my nose. If he was trying to say I shouldn’t blame myself then I appreciated the sentiment, but on the other hand I was worried for Urushi and felt intrinsically involved with whatever this trouble was. And curious. Now that no one seemed at risk of dying, I was really, _really_ curious.

Kakashi opened his eye, looked at me, then down at Urushi and away again.

“Puppies stay with the pack,” he translated. “He wasn’t chasing a high, he was making sure you weren’t alone.”

...Oh.

I blinked. My breath felt funny. It didn’t catch, but it felt heavy, and my hands tightened in Urushi’s fur when I turned to him for confirmation. He tilted his head hopefully, tail lifting in the beginnings of a wag.

“Oh,” I repeated, this time outloud. Inanely, my thoughts supplied: _that was nice of him._

I shook myself, turning back to the others and trying to focus. “So he’s not addicted? He’s fine, summoning him worked, we’re all good?”

I’d asked Kakashi, but it was Pakkun who answered. “He might not be addicted.” Urushi’s tail picked up into a full wag, and he dipped his head towards Pakkun. It was clear he didn’t think there was a problem, but Pakkun shot him a sour look and remained dubious. “ _Might._ Either way, he’s stuck in the human realm. Probably best that you are too, Pup. At least for now. You got too close, it would be dangerous to go back.”

I thought of the grey place and shuddered. “I wasn’t planning on it,” I muttered. Then, at a more audible volume, “Too close to what? The river, the barrier thing - what was it?”

Kakashi made an unhappy noise, opening his eyes again and rejoining the conversation. “Chakra,” he said. “Raw chakra between the summon realm and ours. It looks like a thunderstorm to me.” He shook his head a fraction. “It shouldn’t have been clear enough to look like anything. Contracts form pathways through it, most people don’t even know it’s there. Those that do tend to get lost in it and never make it back.”

I blinked. I could see how it would be easy to get distracted and forget yourself among the threads, but lost? “It showed us the way though,” I protested. “When I thought of Urushi it tried to take us to him, and when you told Pakkun to pull us back there was a thread to show us that as well. If we were going to get lost it’d be in the summon realm, wouldn’t it?”

His gaze sharpened. “A few people have navigated through the barrier by themselves,” he allowed carefully. “Very few. The first summons and the first summoners, before the paths were built. A lot more have died trying. _You_ almost -” he cut himself off. When he started again, it was quieter. “Promise me you won’t go back. Not with me, not by yourself, not even with a contract. If Urushi’s ever able to move between realms again I’ll teach you how to call him, but only if you stay in this world and let him come to you.”

“I promise,” I said, taken aback. “I really wasn’t planning on it. I just wanted to know.”

“Even if it means you can’t sign with another summon? You can call someone from this world, but you have to travel to theirs the first time you meet them. This isn’t a promise I’m asking lightly, Sasuke.”

I hesitated. As popular as summons were in people’s minds, only a fraction of shinobi ever worked with them. I wouldn’t be at a disadvantage if I didn’t. I’d never planned to be a summoner - if Orochimaru was trying to give me snakes, or wolves, or whatever else he deemed suitable then I didn’t _want_ to be a summoner - but.

The cats. Even if they didn’t sign the contract, every Uchiha proved themselves to the cats by collecting their paw prints. It… was a big thing to give up.

Urushi lay down over my legs, nosing at my hand. I moved it to rest on top of his head, tentatively at first, then more firmly as I decided.

“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “Even if it means I can’t go back, I’m glad I went.” I looked up, holding Kakashi’s gaze. The cats were a big thing to give up, but they weren’t here right now. They hadn’t almost died because they’d taken a stupid risk to be able to stay with me no matter what, they didn’t get a say. “I’d rather have Urushi than another summon anyway.”

He nodded slowly, accepting my answer, though his face was unreadable enough that I didn’t know what he thought of it. Pakkun snorted, breaking the tension and climbing stubbornly over Urushi to claim an unoccupied spot halfway up my chest.

“Puppies stay with the pack,” he concluded, sounding satisfied, and accidentally on purpose stood on Urushi’s ear as he went past. “I’m still mad at you,” he told the other dog. “You’re getting downgraded to puppy too.”

Urushi whuffed a denial.

“Then _act_ like one. And don’t scare people like that. It’s rude.” Then to me, “Arms, Pup. You need to hold me or I’ll fall. If you hold me right you can stroke my tummy with your other hand, it’ll make everyone feel better.”

_Interlude: Confused former (?) sensei of Team Seven and grumpy, too-easily attached current (?) sensei of Team Seven_

“... I thought you were on a mission.”

“I was.”

Jiraiya considered, for half a second, the merits of maintaining some semblance of a poker face. He then reasoned that Kakashi wouldn’t understand emotions if he narrated them with subtitles, and gave into the urge to dig his thumbs into his temples and grimace. Neither action helped.

“Where is Sasuke?”

“Safe. I’m with her; this is a clone.”

“Yes, thank you, I noticed.” Did _no one_ respect the sannin title any more. He needed a sake.

“She wants me to take her with me.”

He did not need a sake. He needed a distillery. “To your mission,” he clarified. “In a warzone.” And, when Kakashi only stared back at him, he added with a somewhat incredulous mix of exasperation and despair, “She’s a _genin._ ”

“I won’t let her fight. She’ll be safer outside the village. Orochimaru -”

“I am well aware of what Orochimaru did. God knows where your other two kids got their brains from because it clearly wasn’t from you, but at least they have _sense_.” He shook his head, turning away from Kakashi. Kakashi didn’t say anything so trite as _then you know I’m right,_ or even anything so overt as _the war is a cover and for all we know the sharingan is Orochimaru’s real goal -_ thankfully, because Jiraiya honestly wasn’t sure how he’d’ve reacted if he did.

It was blatantly obvious that the war was a cover. If Orochimaru wanted a byakugan, he’d take one with far less fuss than he’d caused over the Hyuuga heiress. Jiraiya’s personal theory was that Orochimaru was still bitter over the way he’d been outed as an obsessive sociopath and barred from the village, but that might be because Jiraiya himself was still bitter about it.

They were ninja. Obsessive sociopathy was practically encouraged. Why the hell did Orochimaru have to take it so damn far.

But; as tempting as it was to label the whole thing as a crusade for vengeance, Jiraiya knew Orochimaru well enough to look for something more self-serving than that. So did Sarutobi-sensei, and if the sharingan _was_ what Orochimaru was after, then it only made it more important to keep him away from it. Hell, maybe the sharingan was a feint and the byakugan was what he’d wanted all along. Jiraiya didn’t believe that and he highly doubted Kakashi did either - but he spent enough time debating details with the Hokage. He didn’t need to go over it when he was meant to be sleeping as well.

Thankfully, Kakashi didn’t bring it up. “Orochimaru named two traitors,” he said. “A genin - Kabuto Yakushi, Naruto fought him in the exam - and the Kazekage.” Jiraiya retracted his thanks. He’d rather discuss his ex-team mate’s reasons for hating the village that banished him than deal with this.

He closed his eyes, gave himself one short second to curse everyone’s existence, then settled into business. “Kabuto’s in custody. The Yamanaka kid reported him to her dad after the preliminaries and his story didn’t hold up to investigation.” He paused, considered that Orochimaru had been in the village, and amended. “Kabuto _was_ in custody as of this morning.” He hadn’t heard otherwise but though they’d suspected he was a traitor they hadn’t known he was Sound’s, and he made a mental note to double check. “As for the Kazekage… We had suspicions. For Orochimaru to confirm them means either that our suspicions are wrong and he’s trying to separate us from our allies, or that our suspicions are right but that it doesn’t affect his plans either way for us to know.” Or that he was trying to gain Sasuke’s trust; proving yourself an honest source of information was one of the oldest recruitment tactics in the book, and Sasuke’s friendship with Suna’s jinchuuriki was a potentially dangerous connection he could be pulling on.

He hesitated, but in the end he had to ask. “How loyal is she?” Kakashi stiffened, and Jiraiya hid his frustration and pressed, “Could Orochimaru -”

“She said I wouldn’t be able to abandon her because she would refuse to abandon me,” Kakashi interrupted, his words clipped and flatly even. “Her loyalty is not in question.”

The conversation was rapidly slipping away, but Jiraiya held on. He wasn’t accusing Sasuke, but he’d been a spymaster for long enough that he had to at least consider it - and much as he didn’t blame her for it, her background made her vulnerable. “She didn’t report the intrusion. She _vanished_ \- whether she was in the village or not, the fact that we lost track of her is cause for concern by itself. Orochimaru is persuasive when he wants to be. I don’t doubt that Sasuke cares about you, but that’s -”

“Her loyalty is not in question,” Kakashi repeated with cold finality, and with a single hand seal, the clone dispersed.

I didn’t mean to sleep again. I did though, and next time I woke it was to Kakashi presenting me with a flask of tea and a paper-wrapped steamed bun. I drank the tea, but hesitated over the bun. They were usually filled with pork.

“Eat,” he said. “It’s bean paste. You need the energy.”

“I’m eating,” I mumbled, unwrapping it. “I was just wondering where you got it. It’s dawn, nowhere’s open.” He didn’t answer that, just handed me another as soon as my hand was free.

“You need the energy,” he insisted when I went to shake my head. “We’ve got a long way to run.”

“I’m coming with you?” I blurted, scrambling forward off the bed to stand next to him. I had a second of disorientation to think _bed, why bed, why was I in a bed_ before I realised that unless you knew I slept in the kitchen, the bed was the obvious place for Kakashi to have put me if I fell asleep on him. Far more important than trying to work out if he’d read anything into it being _Itachi’s_ bed was the fact that he’d actually agreed to my heat of the moment suggestion last night, and I barely restrained myself from risking indigestion with how fast I ate the other bun.

“We’re tracking,” he explained as I washed my face in the sink. I hadn’t put the hot water on last night and a full shower felt like too much of a delay, so I stuck my head under the tap and decided to live with the tangles I caused in the process. “Sound’s strike teams are able to move undetected around Fire country, and the only evidence we have is from the places they attack. If we can follow the trail from one of the outposts they hit we should be able to find either them or the method they’re using to travel around.”

“Should?”

He raised an eyebrow at me. “Konoha beats Sound in both quality and quantity of ninja. Their stealth is the only thing keeping them alive; any trail we find is as likely to lead to a trap as anything else.”

I hastily suppressed my reaction to that. Given that it went along the lines of _finally, someone who remembers that ninjas are meant to be sneaky,_ that was probably a good thing.

In total, it took me only a few minutes to go from waking up to having everything ready for an out of village mission of unknown length. It was a different sort of readiness to what I’d had before when we went to Wave; I had no mission pack with carefully hidden fruit leather or extra pairs of socks, no crisis of faith debating with Plushie-tan weather the extra blanket for the sleeping roll would be a sign of weakness or not, no time to sort things into neat little piles and choose the best from each of them. What I had were the essentials, fitted into assorted pockets and weapon pouches and kept stocked in advance for emergency missions exactly like these. Other than the weight of shuriken at my hip the heaviest thing I carried was my water, and even that I was expecting to refill multiple times from rivers and streams on the way.

Even so, Kakashi didn’t seem anxious to rush our departure, and checked through my equipment while I grabbed the fish food and reset their feeder at the pond. He followed me out while I was halfway through elbowing Urushi aside so I could get at the timer seal, and handed me back the pouch with a curious expression.

“I didn’t know you had fish.”

“Yeah,” I said distractedly. “Some of them were my parents’, but I rescued the others from around the compound. They got left behind when everyone died.” I snapped the lid shut over the container for the koi pellets and stood up, tapping the seal once as I did so to activate it. Fish fed, me fed, I hadn’t seen Kakashi eat but I assumed he’d had something before I woke up, and now with a sensei-approved weapon pouch, we were ready. It was hazy, the sort of morning that was only cool because it was so early and that threatened a muggy stickiness later in the day, and the only reason I was wearing my jacket was because it was lighter than bringing a sleeping roll for the nights.

I shifted in place as I waited for Kakashi’s direction. Not fidgeting, and not really impatient, but a part of me still didn’t believe that I was being allowed to run away and hide with someone I trusted. The longer we spent _not_ hightailing it out the village the more I worried I’d misunderstood.

It wasn’t running away. I knew that. It was just a mission, it might not last for more than a few days, and Kakashi wasn’t Itachi - I _knew_ that. It didn’t stop me holding my breath as Kakashi stared blankly at the stacked rock decorations I’d copied off Tazuna’s garden, and it didn’t stop Urushi staying alert next to me as he picked up on my nerves.

I briefly wondered where Pakkun was.

“I’m not taking you to war,” Kakashi finally said, and all thoughts of Pakkun vanished from my head. “You’re a genin. I haven’t forgotten that.”

“You were younger than me when you went to war,” I protested. Rationally, it was good that he was conflicted about it. Child soldiers bad, but of all the times - “You said. Sensei, you said I could stay with you.”

He shook himself, putting aside whatever he was thinking about. “That’s not what I meant. The mission is tracking and intel; no fighting, no battles - you do exactly as I say and if you see an enemy, you retreat. Understood?”

It was an effort for my shoulders not to slump in relief. “Understood. Exactly what you tell me to, I promise.”

“I mean it, Sasuke. Even if I engage them, even if you think I need help, your only priority is to escape.” He caught my gaze and held it, his eye serious and his tone heavy with finality. “I’m bringing you with me to keep you safe. Don’t make a mockery of it.”

Unspoken, but clearly heard all the same: _don’t let me have made a mistake._ Another time, I’d draw the connections between Kakashi’s fear of getting his teammates killed and his attempts to leave Team Seven with someone else, but just then I was held still by the weight of what he was saying.

“I promise,” I said again, projecting as much sincerity as I could into the words. It was the second promise I’d made him in as many days. If he was anyone else I’d be chafing at the restrictions. He was Kakashi though, and both promises were meant to protect me; if giving my word that I wouldn’t be reckless was what it took to stay with him, I’d give it.

“Good. We’ll go out one of the side exits. Pay attention to where I step, and don’t cross the seal until I’ve cleared you.” Side exits - ANBU exits? Urushi and I moved to follow him, both of us falling in behind him as he turned in an easy lope towards the village wall. “And Sasuke… Don’t use the things I’ve done in my life as a justification for you to do the same.”

I almost made a quip to try and break the tension at that - something about his fashion sense, maybe the mess he called his hair, I hadn’t thought it through - but I ducked my head instead and nodded. Maybe later, when freedom wasn’t fast approaching and Kakashi was able to relax again, but for now I kept my eyes on the wall ahead and focussed on the feeling of getting out _._

We were several hours in before I thought of the other two. I almost stumbled, flashing into an instinctive kawarimi to hide my misstep. Kakashi glanced at me but didn’t comment - it wasn’t the first time I’d had to use kawarimi to catch up, and the pace he’d set was brutal enough that it wouldn’t be the last.

It didn’t matter, I told myself. I’d done nothing wrong. If your sensei told you to pack for a mission and go, then you packed and went. You didn’t sit around waiting to say goodbye to people. That wasn’t how ninja worked. And if the last thing you’d said to them before going was an accusation and an argument, well, sometimes life was like that. There was no point moping about it.

I kept my face blank, but chewed the inside of my cheek where it wouldn’t show. Urushi was running below us, shadowing us as closely as he could while ducking around the trees we were jumping through. He’d sacrificed silence for speed, but even still his footsteps were barely audible and he was too good to let any branches snag in his fur as he passed.

Sakura wouldn’t have been able to keep up. Naruto, maybe, but only because his stamina was unrealistic and the kyuubi would heal any muscles he damaged by pushing too hard. Even if they could, they were both combat ninja, Sakura specialising in taking down a single opponent and Naruto in controlling the field - the mission we were on was practically the opposite of their skill sets. It wouldn’t have made sense for them to come. And if I _had_ stopped to stay goodbye they’d’ve been difficult about being left out, so really, it was their own fault that I hadn’t.

… That wasn’t fair.

We reached a change in terrain, an area of flat land where the ground was soft and the trees were cut through with silty, slow-flowing rivers. Urushi took to the water with relief, running over the surface of it far easier than he had been across the tangled roots of the forest floor. Kakashi dropped down to run with him. He must’ve known the area; though the rivers curved in wide, directionless arcs, the one he’d chosen let us keep going forward with barely any detours, and the current was slow enough that it took barely any concentration to water-walk on it.

I… left my teammates behind. I didn’t even think. I could call it a mission all I wanted but it felt like an escape, and I hadn’t even hesitated to abandon them for it. Them, Chouji, Shikamaru - I knew it wasn’t as final as that, I knew Kakashi was still Konoha and we weren’t leaving for good, but if it was? If we had been?

There was nothing to kawarimi with on the river. I couldn’t let myself fall behind and make up the distance with chakra, and as fast as I was, I’d been running for hours and I wasn’t built for a marathon. I dogged Kakashi’s heels and matched my footsteps with his, lengthening my stride to compensate and refusing to acknowledge the ache in my legs.

If we had been leaving for good, then I would have done the same thing. It had been the plan from the start. I’d always been going to abandon them, and if they were hurt by it - then it _was_ their own fault. I’d never asked them to love me. I’d never said I loved them back. And if it was hypocritical of me to fight Kakashi on his pulling away but to drop Naruto and Sakura as soon as I got the chance, well, tough shit. I never said I was perfect, either.

If they loved me as much as they said they did, they’d understand. It was fine. If they didn’t understand, then - it was still fine. And if it wasn’t, there was nothing I could do about it now.

“Here,” Kakashi said, dropping back next to me and slowing to a jog. I blinked up at him, thrown by the change of pace, and took the bun he passed more as an automatic reaction than a conscious choice.

“More red bean paste?” I asked.

“Easy carbohydrates.” He didn’t make any move to eat anything himself, but he did flash through a purification jutsu and skim a thin stream of water off the river into a flask. “Drink,” he ordered.

I barely refrained from pulling a face after the first mouthful. There must have been something already in the flask; it was an odd combination of sweet and acidic, like a diluted fruit vinegar with too much sugar in it. I recognised it as an energy drink - Iruka used to give us oranges if we flagged in training, the concept was the same. I’d’ve preferred the oranges. Or just water to be honest, but I knew better, and alternated careful sips with bites of the bun to try and mask the taste.

“Sound are sabotaging,” Kakashi said. We were still jogging, but much slower than we had been before and I couldn’t help the relief I felt at the break. “They hit civilian routes early on, focussing on terrain damage. When the genin corps were assigned to fix bridges and roads, Sound attacked them too. They’ve targeted outposts, supply stores, patrol bases - all stationary targets. Rarely ninja on patrol, and couriers moving at speed remain almost entirely untouched. Their teams are small, no more than two or three ninja on each one, and based on the fighting styles and kekkei genkei there are two confirmed teams with an unconfirmed potential third.”

I nodded, slotting the information in around what I’d seen back in Konoha. It matched up with the shortages I’d noticed, the fact that crucial supplies - likely carried in storage scrolls by the courier ninjas - were still able to get through, the almost fanatic way we’d been tasked with keeping track of the hospital’s stock. What didn’t match up was the fact that Konoha was putting so much effort into shoring up the wall and other defenses; if Orochimaru was hitting small stationary targets and genin corps, it suggested he didn’t have the strength for a full assault of the village. I knew he didn’t - it was why he’d needed Sand. Potentially still had Sand. And even in his original invasion plan he hadn’t dared attack head on without the exam to act as a cover, providing a distraction and keeping a lot of people occupied with other things.

Much like the war was doing now.

On second thought, it was probably a good thing Konoha was building up the village’s defenses.

“However the strike teams travel, it’s not over land,” Kakashi continued. “Taken individually the distances aren’t unreasonable, but to run that far that often and hit as hard as they do when they arrive, all while evading detection - it’s unrealistic. Our best guess is some kind of summoning or transportation technique. Given how accurate and precisely timed they are, they’re almost certainly sending scouts out first and waiting for their signal to move.” He handed me another flask. I grimaced - I wasn't actually a wet-behind-the-ears new graduate, I knew how to hydrate myself - but took it anyway. “That’s where we come in. We know the scouts are present at the attacks, even if they never engage in combat; that gives us a starting point to track them from. From the pattern of attacks so far they travel on foot, estimated mid chunin level speed - once we have their trail it’s just a case of running them down till we catch them.”

“Couldn’t that be a misdirection?” I asked. “If the strike teams have a way of getting around Fire country, then the scouts could also -”

He shook his head, a single, abrupt motion. “Whoever the scouts are, Orochimaru has gone to a lot of effort to hide them. It’s not impossible that he’s double bluffing, but it’s unlikely. They’re our best shot at information.”

Information. That meant we were bringing them in alive, which would normally up a mission to an automatic A rank - battles were a lot easier when you weren’t holding back from killing your opponent. From the sounds of it though the scouts were stealth specialists rather than combat, and if their speed was only chunin level we could hope that the rest of their skills were lower than that.

Though, I thought wryly, I wasn’t meant to be worrying about the actual capture part of the mission. I’d promised no fighting. The scout could pull out a random powerup to full jounin if they wanted, Kakashi would still be able to take them.

“So,” I summarised. “We’re after a scout.”

“Scout, or evidence of how the strike teams travel. They hit an outpost in the north west a few days ago - we have a good idea where they’ll head next, but we won’t know until they attack. Did you cover tracking in the academy?”

“The basics. Non-chakra techniques only.”

If he was disappointed that I didn’t have more to offer, he didn’t show it, barely pausing before asking his next question. He also started edging up the speed again, and Urushi shifted his gait from an easy trot to a more ground-eating lope.

“Your senses?”

“Average, except for sight, particularly distance or small details.”

“Only with the sharingan or without as well?”

I hesitated there. “Both?” Obviously my sharingan gave me an upgrade, but I didn’t honestly know if my normal eyes were any better than average. I’d never had other eyes to compare them to.

No, wait. I had, but that was a long time ago and I couldn’t remember the difference.

“I’m pretty sure I have better vision than most people, but I’ve never tested it to confirm,” I settled for saying. I could just be very observant, but it felt right, and either way it would be useful for what we were doing and it seemed to satisfy Kakashi.

“Your arm,” he said next.

“Fully healed, no remaining damage.”

“Where did you go after talking to Orochimaru?”

“To the Suna -” I sucked in a sharp breath. He hadn’t even changed tone between questions. I’d started and I couldn’t stop, but I also couldn’t help but feel betrayed that he’d tricked me into answering like that. “... Compound. I went to the Suna compound.”

“Why?”

Hadn’t even changed tone, hell, he hadn’t even changed expression. He wasn’t quite as closed and cold as he sometimes got when he was being mission-Kakashi, and I held onto that and told myself I hadn’t done anything wrong.

“I was looking for Gaara,” I said honestly. “He’s a friend, and he helped me against Orochimaru before. But I didn’t find him, so I just went home.” I tilted my head, trying to read _something_ from his face. In hindsight, sure, vanishing wasn’t great but - come on. Cut me some slack, I was stressed.

Finally, he reacted, even if only with the faintest crease of frown and a headshake that he turned into the motion of looking forward again. “Gaara,” he repeated, and my shoulders dropped in relief at the return of his usual drawl. Not fully - mission-Kakashi was still definitely present, and there was no slouch in his running posture - but he’d let go of at least some of the tension he’d been carrying all morning. “The redhead. Suna’s jinchuuriki?”

“Jinchuuriki aren’t bad,” I said immediately, and scowled as I thought of Naruto. “People need to stop treating them like they are.”

“Saa, Sasuke,” Kakashi complained. “Please don’t break another important rule until I’ve finished processing the ones from yesterday, you’ll make me go grey.”

“I - didn’t. What? No rules. You’re already grey, it’s fine. I didn’t break a rule.”

He raised an eyebrow at me - I think, it was the one under his headband and I was guessing based on the movement of his forehead - and I clamped my mouth shut. “When an enemy kage approaches you you’re meant to report it to your superior and be available for questioning,” he said, verging on a sing-song pattern of a repeated saying. I doubted it was one of the shinobi tenets we’d learnt at the academy. Iruka probably thought it didn’t need to be said. “You’re not meant to seek out a suspected enemy and then hide under a genjutsu it took your sensei’s sharingan to see through. People don’t like it.”

I ducked my head, trying to squash the instinctive defensiveness I felt. Kakashi was right. I just hadn’t been thinking. Because, as previously stated, I was _stressed._ Even so, Kakashi’s almost teasing tone buoyed my confidence, and I couldn’t let it slide entirely. “I reported it to Pakkun and he took it to you, it’s not my fault you were so far away. And Gaara’s still a friend.”

“You do like making friends, don’t you.”

I rolled my eyes at that, because it was blatantly untrue. Gaara was an outlier, he didn’t count.

“And!” Kakashi turned and gave me an eye smile. “I’m silver, not grey. It’s a subtle but vital difference.” Then he increased his speed until I swear we were running faster than before, and I had to resort to glaring at the back of his head because I couldn’t spare the breath to retort.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Urushi: This puppy needs someone  
> Urushi:  
> Urushi: I am someone  
> Urushi: This puppy now has someone
> 
> Also! I absolutely love reading through all your comments, and I know I don't say it enough but the way you guys engage with the fic and your different reactions to the characters is the best part of writing and genuinely, thank you so much to all of you. Even if sometimes your analysis is scary levels of insightful and I'm pretty sure that at least some of you have secret mind powers that you're using on me. You're terrifying. I love you. Keep on being awesome <3


	38. Chapter 38

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Quick reminder that this whole fic is covered under a 'general purpose ninja stabby times' warning. If this totally random and non-spoilery reminder has left you unsettled and/or worried, there are end notes.

We ran through the day without stopping. We did take breaks, dropping to slower jogs along some of the flatter stretches, but the first time I stood still for more than two minutes was well after the sun went down.

I was _shattered._

Speed, I could do. Stamina, I had, and I was too careful with conditioning training to get stitches or muscle cramp - but I was still a genin. Covering half of Fire country in a single go wasn’t part of my usual skill set and I was suffering.

Well. That wasn’t quite true. Kakashi was frustratingly good at judging exactly how far he could push me before I collapsed, and there was no future in going too fast and damaging yourself on the way to a mission, but still. _Still._

“Don’t sleep yet, Pup,” Pakkun advised, tongue lolling out his mouth in a doggy-laugh as he sat on my feet to get my attention. “You’ll regret it if you do.”

I’d’ve glared at him if I had the energy. I didn’t. “Why are you here?” I asked, eyes still closed and my entire bodyweight being supported by the tree behind me. Actually, scratch that; he was here because Kakashi had summoned him. What I wanted to know was, “How come you got out of running?”

“I’m a pug,” he answered dryly. “If you want me around that badly, you can always carry me.”

“Let me think - _no._ ”

“It’s not a bad idea,” Kakashi said. I hadn’t heard him come back from setting up the perimeter, but that wasn’t really a surprise. You didn’t survive in ANBU as long as he had by being clunky. “Not Pakkun, but Urushi. You should get used to carrying him.”

I did open my eyes at that, staring at him incredulously. Urushi was both a lot bigger and a lot faster than Pakkun - I was pretty sure he was better at long distances than I was. He was still up and moving, for one thing. He wasn’t even _panting_.

“Not for this trip,” Kakashi allowed. “We haven’t got the time. If he’s staying with you in the human realm though it’s something you’ll need for the future, particularly if you’re moving through difficult terrain.” 

Oh. It was a dirty trick, to sweeten bad news with something that made me happy. Didn’t stop it being effective. And it wasn’t even bad news; Urushi could water walk, but he couldn’t climb. It only made sense that I’d have to carry him sometimes, and it was worth it to have him stay with me. I tried to give Kakashi a scowled side-eye to tell him I knew exactly what he was doing, but given the rush of warmth I felt at the reminder that Urushi and I got to keep each other, it may not have had quite the effect I wanted it to.

Kakashi’s raised eyebrow and the twitch of his mask gave away that it didn’t.

“For now though,” he said, changing the subject and withdrawing a square shaped packet from one of his numerous pockets. “This is protein powder. It contains everything you need to survive, but it will leave you feeling hungry and is deliberately the worst tasting thing you’ve ever eaten. Soldier pills are potentially a close second. When there’s no other choice, you can live on it for up to a week at a time. When there are other choices, your stomach begs you to take them.”

I blinked. “Why?”

“Because you’re designed to eat food, and because people were swapping the nicer ones in for too many meals to be healthy. So.” He held it out to me, but his fingers tightened on it before I could take it. “I'm going hunting. You can eat what I catch, or you can eat the powder. Either one is fine.”

I paused. It sounded like it could have been a test, and maybe when I first met him that’s what I would have assumed, but I didn’t think it was.

“... The powder,” I said.

He nodded. He didn’t look surprised, and I wondered if it was a coincidence that he’d brought bean-paste buns rather than pork ones, or if he’d already known. “Could you eat meat if you had to?”

My stomach turned. “Fish?”

“Meat. Fish has less fat, less effect as a blood replenisher, and is less readily available on missions.”

No, that didn’t help. “Um.” I took a breath, and tried to imagine if I was genuinely starving. Unsurprisingly, that didn’t help either, and I ducked my head to hide my reaction. “Maybe?”

“That’s a no then,” Kakashi interpreted. I winced, but he just put the protein packet in my hand. “I prefer to mix it with just enough water to swallow and get it over with, but I’ve heard people say it’s bearable if you dilute it.” He hesitated, then in a carefully light tone, “I don't eat apples. Sometimes it happens, and if you can’t control it, you have to know how to work around it. Keeping several days’ supply of protein slurry in your weapon pouch would be one way to do it.”

I looked up at him curiously, my unease at the thought of eating meat forgotten. If he'd said chocolate, I would've thought it was something to do with the dogs - not every summoner picked up traits from their summons but enough did that it wouldn't be unusual - and if he'd chosen something with a particularly strong flavour I could've understood that, but. Apples? It was an odd one to avoid.

He didn’t elaborate, and the way he artfully looked away and made it seem casual rather than deliberate said he wasn’t going to. “I’ll be back soon. There’s wire traps between the trees, don’t set them off while I’m gone.”

We were running again before dawn. Slower this time, enough for Pakkun to join us, but a combination of starting early and covering the majority of the distance the day before meant that the sun was still low in the sky when Kakashi signaled for caution.

“If they’ve stuck to the route they were following before, the scout should be close ahead of us,” he said. “Keep your guard up in case they’ve doubled back. From here we go with stealth; if you notice the scout, or any signs of their trail, tell me. If you notice the strike team, fall back.”

I nodded. We were far enough north now that the dense forests had started to thin out, larger trees giving way to patchy scrub and areas of open grass. Still more than enough vegetation to provide cover, but it made for an indirect, winding path that avoided both the rivers and the occasional marshier stretches between them, and cut a wide detour around the lakes.

I was relieved we didn’t get too close. Wetlands were pretty, and colonised by so many egrets that they formed massive clouds of white when they took off in a flock, but the tall grass was whippy and did an excellent job of hiding how uneven the ground beneath it was. In theory we’d been taught in the academy how to run fast on almost every kind of terrain; in reality, some things were much harder to mimic than others, and the combination of spongy and part-flooded near the edge of the water was unfamiliar to me.

Also. Wet. Not enough to chakra walk on, plenty enough to be disgusting. Worst possible combination. Yuck.

A few miles in, in one of the thicker patches of trees where the roots held the soil in place and there were actual plants instead of endless grasses, we reached the outpost.

We hadn’t been the first ones there.

The building itself was half-dug into the ground. From every angle except one it looked like a thicket of ferns and bracken, interspersed with exactly the right amount of thorns and nettles to look unpleasant to walk through while not being suspiciously offputting. Without the sharingan, I could pick out the details that marked the front entrance as genjutsu; several of the plants had repeating leaf patterns, obviously cloned from neighbours further back in the group, and the fake brambles were heavily laden with berries despite every other branch hanging that low having been stripped of its fruit by passing animals. With the sharingan the whole illusion would be obvious, but it was good practice to not rely on it and I didn’t turn it on.

There were other signs giving the outpost away, and I focussed on them to distract myself from the small clearing in front of it. The ground was a lighter colour, for one; not that the soil was different but the water was draining through it too fast, running along the edges of the hideout’s waterproofed foundations rather than soaking straight down as it did elsewhere. One of the trees was growing wrong; its roots had probably been damaged when the outpost was first established. There were four dead bodies lying on the ground, one of them half in and half out the genjutsu so that their feet and most of their left leg seemed to vanish into nothing. There was an odd lack of twigs or small branches compared to other parts of the forest, as though they’d been gathered for kindling. Little details, subtle enough that few people would’ve known there was anything there if they hadn’t known to look for it.

I sat motionless on the branch and stared at them, begging my sharingan not to activate. One of the dead genin, chunin, people had been crushed. The blow caved in their lower ribs and destroyed their hips and pelvis, but the way they were lying and the lack of crater marks on the ground around them said they’d been caught mid-air when it happened. They’d probably survived.

No, they’d definitely survived. Look at their throat. You were always meant to check downed enemies after a fight, it wasn’t unusual to see a body with their throat neatly slit as well as other, more violent wounds. If the throat wound was dry you could use that as evidence that they’d already been dead when it happened, but you couldn’t always turn the logic round the other way. Corpses could still bleed, if you wanted them to. They just needed to be fresh enough that nothing had coagulated, and angled so that gravity could do its job, that’s all. Useful for disguising the time of death if you wanted to sow confusion after an assassination, but I couldn’t remember just then how much time you had before the blood had set too much to be convincing. Mizuki gave the lecture. But I couldn’t remember what he said.

Except, this wasn’t a disguised assassination, and the point wasn’t that corpses could bleed. The point was that the blood had spread too far from the geninchuninperson’s head, so it had either been forced out by pressure from their heart, or more likely they’d jerked back in pain when it happened to try and get away. Or both. There was a lot of blood. It was probably both.

There was a dead person on the floor and I could read their last movements in the spatter of red around them to determine how they died.

“Yesterday evening,” Kakashi said, rising from his kneeling position next to another body. “Pakkun, check inside. Urushi, scent trail. We passed a river not long ago, they could’ve used it to hide their tracks but I didn’t see anything between there and here. Sasuke -”

He stopped. It took me an embarrassingly long second to register it, and I had to drag my eyes away from the dead corpse dead person from - I was distracted by analysing the battlefield, and I turned to him a beat too late to be natural.

“They probably left through the trees,” I said to cover my slip. “It rained recently, the soil’s damp. If they’re trying to hide their trail, they’d know better than to walk over it and leave footprints.”

“There are chakra techniques to avoid footprints,” Kakashi said slowly. “Sasuke… Is this your first time dealing with a casualty on a mission?”

Yes. No. No, it wasn’t. Don’t be stupid. No, wait, it was. Did it make a difference if the casualty was on a mission or not.

“I’m fine,” I said instead of answering. “The academy had training.” On a mission or not I’d seen corpses before, and thinking of it made me remember the other half of death. I shook my head, annoyed at myself for forgetting. “Fire. They need - I have an immolation jutsu. Or burial, but I don’t know how to do that. No, I can dig. But I don’t know how to earth. I only know fire.”

I bit my lip before anything else could spill out and looked away, willing someone to change the subject. Away was a mistake; there was a girl on the other side of the clearing, and she’d been caught in a wire-trap and hit by at least a dozen kunai at once. Whoever killed her had retrieved the kunai, but the wire was left tangled around her, and from the way it was partly disintegrating it wasn’t wire at all but probably some sort of organic substance from a kekkei genkei that was sticky enough to tear her skin where it attached to her and I wanted to stop now, please.

“Sasuke,” Kakashi said again, much closer than he had been before. I was up a tree. There wasn’t anything for him to stand on that was directly in front of me so he knelt on the branch beside me, hands on my shoulders to turn me until I was facing him. “We’re not going to bury them.”

“Oh, ok, I can -”

“Or burn them. That’s not our responsibility, you don’t need to worry about it.”

I blinked. “But they’re dead.”

He nodded at that, just once, watching for my reaction. I moved to look past him, eyes drawn towards the clearing, and he tightened his grip on my shoulders to stop me. He looked uneasy. Above his mask his face was smooth, his one visible eye and eyebrow not betraying any expression, but the mask itself didn’t hide as much as he thought it did. He didn’t know how to deal with a genin who couldn’t deal with death and I needed to pull myself together and stop making a fuss.

“I don’t mind burning them,” I promised him. “I’ve done it before. I’m fine, I swear.”

“It’s not that. We’re trackers; our priority is finding the scout. We need to move on while the trail is fresh. If we stay, we’re not only putting the mission at risk, we could be putting ourselves at risk - dead or wounded comrades are common bait for a trap.” He shifted uncomfortably, a minute movement that I wasn’t meant to catch. “We have retrieval teams,” he offered. “The bodies won’t be here for long. I know it feels wrong to leave them -” _do you?_ I thought before I could stop myself, then stifled the thought “- but the best thing to do in war is to win it before anyone else can die.”

I took a breath. He was right. Not right, nothing was _right_ about war - but he made sense.

Konoha’s view of death was abrupt and uncompromising. You had a soul, when you died, it went to the pure lands. You were remembered in the victory your death bought and in the actions of your family - and, to a lesser extent, your team and friends and village - and the most important thing about your body was to ensure an enemy couldn’t use it against your allies. At least some of it stemmed from the glorification of ninja life and the necessity of convincing entire generations to die for the village, but ultimately, it was practical. There was no purpose getting hung up about it. These people were dead. Their bodies were just bodies, it would make no difference to them if I cremated them or not.

I took another breath to convince myself, and refocussed on Kakashi with stubborn determination.

“Trackers,” I repeated. “I can track. What am I tracking.”

His shoulders visibly dropped in relief. “The strike team hit them from this direction,” he said, pointing behind the hideout. “You can tell from -” he glanced at me, and smoothly changed his sentence. “- the battle. If they’re both coming from the same place, they’ll almost certainly have one high and one low, and you were right about the ground being damp. Start there, see if you can trace where they came from or left to.”

He started moving halfway through his explanation, skirting the edge of the clearing and dropping down to where he’d indicated the strike team as attacking from. I followed close on his heels, stopping at a branch just above his head. “Stay off the ground until you find the tracks - if they were using chakra to hide their footprints, the signs are easy to contaminate. Do you want to learn a jutsu?”

“Uh. Now?”

He raised an eyebrow at me. “Saa, do you not want a jutsu? I thought they were all the rage with kids these days.”

My scowl was an instinctive response to his teasing tone. His head-tilted innocence seemed an instinctive response to my scowl.

“Here,” he said. “Fire release: Firefly no jutsu. Don’t use your sharingan, you’ll know it better if you learn the long way.”

The hand seals were simple, and once I’d shifted my chakra to the right element the jutsu was surprisingly straightforward to pick up. _Controlling_ it on the other hand took far more concentration; it created a small, heatless fireball that hovered anywhere within about a metre of me, acting as a more-or-less steady source of light. The more steady being when I frowned it into submission, the less being when I took my eyes off it and let my attention wander. Kakashi promised it’d become second nature with practice but as it stood, it took a frustrating amount of brain power for such a simple technique.

It also took an embarrassingly long time for me to realise that was probably the point. The distraction of controlling the firefly, of working out why the hell Kakashi thought I needed a _torch_ when the sharingan let me see almost as clearly in the dark as in the light - I bit my lip, glancing over my shoulder and tempted to ask him, but didn’t. I could work it out. He had a sharingan too, he was well aware of what I could see. I didn’t have a strong nose or a chakra sense to help me; if I was tracking, it was sight-based, and if I had to stare at the dirt until every indent and its shadows were imprinted in my memory -

Wait. The shadows.

I brought the firefly lower, then swept it out in a slow arc. I’d been looking at the dirt itself, and the dips and shallow markings didn’t look like anything of note - but with the light source held low, the _shadows_ were so much clearer and easier to see. No footprints, but that just there was an unnaturally straight edge with a regular curve to it. I pushed the firefly back until it hovered over the next one, and again - a curve, marking the edge of a very slightly compacted disk of earth.

“Chakra snowshoe,” I muttered. A physical snowshoe would be ridiculously ungainly, but balancing your weight on a thin layer of chakra so it distributed evenly and left less of a mark… I grinned. At the risk of sounding like a cliche movie villain, “I have you now, fucker.”

Even so, it was a slow process following their movements. I was relying on fractionally deeper parts of the indent to show the pressure from their heel and toe on the disk, and combining that with tiny scuff marks to guess the direction they were walking. In my mind I built the picture of them; not too tall, or they’d go around rather than under some of the branches they ducked beneath, not too heavy or they’d leave a deeper trail in the soil. Chakra based combat technique; whatever it was, it seemed to involve standing in one place on the edge of the clearing for a while before venturing out at a casual saunter, probably to check for survivors and cut the throats of any still alive.

I decided I didn’t like them.

But; I tracked them back through the forest to an area far enough away that we were out of visible range, and it was only when I stifled a swear at the disobedient firefly for the fourth time that I realised I’d been completely distracted from thinking about the bodies.

I paused. Urushi was circling me, nose alternating between the ground and whichever parts of the trees he could reach as he tried to pick up a third scent to mark the scout. He paused with me, lifting his head and straining his ears for a sign of what had made me stop.

“Nothing,” I told him, shaking it off. “Sorry. I’m all good.” 

It… wasn’t even a lie.

I blinked, thrown by how easily I’d moved past the shock of finding the dead outpost ninjas. Was that it, had it just been shock? I’d said the academy had training, sure, but I’d never bought into it. Some of the desensitisation techniques were so blatantly obvious, I’d never expected them to work on me. I’d never _wanted_ them to work on me. There were enough things I knew I disagreed with that I thought they hadn’t.

Except, here I was. Four people had died bloody, painful deaths, and I’d had a minor hiccough, told myself to get over it, and moved on. 

I didn’t really know how to react to that.

“Child soldiers are bad,” I told Urushi, reaffirming it more for myself than for him. “Tiny people shouldn’t learn sexy no jutsu. Or be left to raise themselves. Dying isn’t heroic, it’s shit, and the Hokage is a clan-killing murderer and we hate him.” 

I wasn’t an idiot. I said it quietly, more under my breath than anything else - I wasn’t even sure Urushi could hear enough to understand more than my tone. Saying it outloud helped though. It made it more definitive than if I’d only thought it; I was still me, I hadn’t accidentally been rewritten by Konoha’s brainwashing when I wasn’t paying attention. The fact that still me was a lot more capable of compartmentalising death than I thought wasn’t great, but. Not the end of the world. Probably for the best, in the grand scheme of things.

I shook my head to clear it. “Sorry,” I said again. “Ignore me. It’s not important.”

Urushi cocked his head at me curiously, but when I didn’t seem distressed or say anything else he whuffed and accepted it.

Kakashi joined us a few minutes later.

“Here,” I said, holding the firefly jutsu near the ground to show him where I’d tracked the strike team’s trail to. Two sets of footprints - one small, disappearing after two paces and replaced with the snowshoe disks; the second larger, though not ridiculously so, which led to the sort of gouge left by someone leaping up to the trees with chakra-enhanced force. There was nothing to show how either of them arrived; no impact of them dropping down from above, no disturbed earth of a jutsu bringing them up from below. They weren’t there, then they were, then they closed in on the outpost and killed people.

Kakashi nodded, easily picking up the same information. “The second attacker moved through the trees. They didn’t bother to hide their trail - most likely they assumed staying off the ground would be enough.”

I snorted. “Not a leaf nin, then.”

“No,” he agreed, amused, then his face dropped back to more serious lines. “We’re missing someone. The battle had two ninja; a long distance fighter favouring projectiles and a heavy hitter with a blunt-force weapon, probably a club of some description. The long distance fighter matches the attacker who stayed up in the trees, but the second set of tracks don’t match the heavy hitter. They’re too light.”

I frowned, thinking it through. If it were a three-man strike team, we’d expect to see the third set of prints leading back to the same arrival point. Or, it didn’t have to be three on the strike team - tree guy and the heavy hitter could be the attackers, the one I’d been following could be the scout. It would explain why they waited in the trees.

“Not quite,” Kakashi disagreed, motioning towards a rockier patch of ground that Urushi was standing over. “There’s three distinct scents here. Two of them go to the clearing, the last - the scout - hangs back. If your attacker went to the clearing but didn’t join the battle itself, we’re probably looking at a genjutsu user or a healer.”

“Or a summoner,” I said slowly. I was being stupid. An organic, wire-like substance, someone who stayed up in the trees and favoured projectiles; that was Kidomaru. The spider guy on the Sound Four team. It had to be, surely. Which meant that the logical heavy hitter was - what was the big guy called? Jiboro? Jirou? He fought Chouji.

But if it was him, he didn’t match the footsteps I’d been following. The Sound Four didn’t have a healer - I didn’t think, I couldn’t remember what the siamese-twin guys did but I was _pretty_ sure it wasn’t healing - but they did have Tayuya. She used her flute for sound-based genjutsu, which matched someone staying on the sidelines of the battle, but she also used it for _summoning._

Summoning what. Summoning something.

“The heavy hitter,” I said. “It’s a summon. That’s why we can’t find any evidence of them leaving the clearing - they were dispelled.”

“Being strong doesn’t stop people being stealthy,” Kakashi pointed out. I shook my head.

“Maybe, but stealthy people aren’t usually careless. One of the ninja they hit survived to the end of the battle, but it was this person -” I tapped the footprints to indicate Tayuya “- who went out after to cut their throat. Can we give them names? I feel this would be easier if we gave them names.”

“If you like?”

“Ok. Tree-guy, Summon-guy, Summoner-guy. And Scout.”

“We don’t know for sure that it’s a summon and a summoner. I’m not saying it’s not, and your theory makes sense, but the more you fix in your mind that something’s true the harder it is to see evidence that disagrees with you.”

I suppressed a scowl. The more I thought about it the more I knew I was right and we were looking at a Kidomaru-Tayuya pairing, but Kakashi made a fair point. Besides, my Sound Four theory didn’t cover who the scout was, I couldn’t rely on it too heavily.

“Tree-guy, Big-guy, Little-guy,” I amended. “And guy is gender neutral. Big-guys can be kunoichi too, we’re not making assumptions.”

“Tree-guy, Big-guy, Little-guy,” Kakashi repeated obediently. “And a scout who, as far as I can tell, never got within fifty metres of the outpost itself.”

I glanced back towards the outpost. Fifty metres wasn’t a great distance, but we were among the trees - even with the sharingan I couldn’t see anything from here, for the simple reason that there were trunks and branches in the way.

“It’s more than we’ve had to go on so far,” Kakashi concluded, standing up. “We also have a scent trail for the direction the scout left in. Pakkun and I will take the trees, you and Urushi follow below - you have a chakra sense, don’t you?”

I grimaced. “Ish. It doesn’t sense chakra, just physical shapes.” I hadn’t even practiced with it for a while; once I’d discovered that I could make a chakra arm by adding water to it I’d focussed on training that instead.

“Use it. Trackers are always at risk of ambush - we’re literally following an enemy wherever they want to lead us, don’t ever let yourself be caught unaware.”

I nodded, carefully filtering all traces of elements out of my chakra as I stood to follow him. The firefly jutsu winked out and I threw a henge over myself for good measure, then fell in behind Kakashi as he took to the branches above us and left.

We didn’t find the scout. The trail held for a good few hours; at various points they tried to throw us off by going over or through water, or switching to stony ground when it was available, but as good as they were at not leaving visual evidence they weren’t used to dogs and it showed. They should’ve made more use of the water - there was plenty of it around, but the scout only ever took brief detours over the rivers or lakes. It was a slow and frustrating process to scour the opposite bank for where they came back to dry land, but it wasn’t where we lost them.

It was the grass, in the end. I knew it I hadn’t liked it for a reason. Even with both Urushi and Pakkun tracking, the smell of the marsh overpowered everything else. Any traces of the scout left on the grass itself got broken down by a combination of the sun - now directly overhead, it was just gone noon - and the brisk wind causing any sweat and scent trails to evaporate, and whoever the scout was they were familiar enough with long grass not to leave any flattened or broken in their wake.

I slowed to a walk, trusting my henge to keep me hidden and trying hard not to feel dejected. Kakashi and Urushi were trying to pick up the trail again, checking places the scout might have circled round or laid false evidence to mislead us, but Pakkun hung back with me.

“Oi,” he huffed, inserting himself between my feet and forcing me to look down to avoid stepping on him. “Stop that. Tracker missions aren’t as straightforward as some. You made good progress, stop trying to kill the plants with your eyes.”

“Sharingans don’t work like that,” I mumbled, but dutifully flattened out my resting scowl. “Kakashi’d’ve made better progress if I wasn’t slowing him down.”

“You’re faster than me, Pup. Are you saying I held us up as well? There’s no point racing if you don’t know where you’re going.” He cocked his head in thought, then stood on his back legs and planted his front paws against my shin. “Though, since you mention it. You’re faster than me. Carry me.”

“We’re _walking._ ”

He planted his paws harder. I gave in and carried him. So much for _always being alert for an ambush_ , I now had both arms full of pug and I wouldn’t hesitate to drop him if I needed to defend.

“I didn’t mean slowing him down now,” I said, picking up the conversation again. “I meant yesterday. The outpost was attacked last night. If he hadn’t had to stop for me, he’d’ve been back by then.” I hesitated at a sudden thought. “If he hadn’t had to go to Konoha in the first place, the outpost might not have been attacked at all.”

Pakkun twisted in my hold to give me an unimpressed look, then bit my thumb. 

“ _Ow._ ”

“I thought I told you not to borrow trouble. That includes making it up where it doesn’t exist.”

“But if -”

“If he’d not gone to Konoha and decided to guard that particular outpost, Sound would’ve attacked a different one. If he’d been here last night, he could’ve got a head start tracking the scout, but he also wouldn’t have thought of the Big-guy being a summon. If you keep following his lead and assuming everything’s your fault when it’s not, I’m going to get Bull to sit on _both_ of you until you stop. Clear?”

“Clear,” I repeated instinctively, somewhat wide-eyed. “I’m not assuming everything’s my fault. I just -”

“That doesn’t sound very clear to me.”

I glared at him. “I’m just trying to think things through,” I continued, daring him to cut me off again. “Like an actual mature human being. With consequences and shit. Because I’m sick of turning around and discovering I fucked everything up without realising it, so, you know, I thought I’d at least get the realisation part down so I could start spotting fuck-ups _before_ I do them and go for something else instead, if that’s ok with you.”

He licked his nose at me. I didn’t understand dog body language enough to know what that meant.

“Huh,” he finally said, and wriggled to a comfier position. “You didn’t fuck up. If anything, the strike team was bolder than they would’ve been if Kakashi was close by, they left us more clues to follow. Like I said, we’ve made good progress. Tracking suits you.”

My annoyance vanished, deflated by his praise. “Uh. Thank you?”

He licked his nose again. I needed a dictionary. Maybe I could teach Urushi to write with a brush in his mouth and he could translate.

“You’re welcome. Now carry me faster, if I wanted to go this slow I could’ve stayed on the ground and done it myself.”

I scowled again, told myself that I liked Pakkun and wasn’t going to dump him in a stinky puddle, and stepped up to a jog.

I saw Tayuya that night. I couldn’t remember what she looked like, but I was pretty sure her hair was red. Her summons - I had no idea. They were behind me, and I only looked at her; I didn’t have to know what they were to hear the swing, the crunch, and the thud of the ninja they were fighting being knocked out of the air. Tayuya looked at me with a complete lack of expression, drew her kunai, and stepped past me to cut their throat.

It looped.

Her hair was red, but the outpost had been attacked in the evening and the trees blocked out most of the sun. In the dark, it looked black. She drew her kunai and stepped past me to cut their throat.

Everything looked black under the trees, except the parts that weren’t. Her red hair might not’ve shown up, but other red did; red on the ground, red blood spreading from behind me, red in the sky that replaced the upper branches. It reflected off her eyes. She drew her kunai and stepped past me to cut their throat.

I wasn’t bothered by the bodies. I couldn’t even see them. She drew her sword and stepped past me to cut their throat.

There wasn’t anything I could do. It didn’t mean anything that I wasn’t bothered by the bodies. I was a ninja. What did you expect.

She drew her sword and stepped past me to stab it through my chest.

We found the trail again through a combination of Kakashi’s knowledge of targets in the area and judicious use of his shadow clones to check multiple routes at once until we hit on the right one to follow. Normal sleep patterns went out the window; we took short rests, just enough to keep us going, then pushed forward. It left very little time for dreaming, which was a plus, and I was actually surprised by how well I adapted to frequent catnapping instead of full nights of sleep.

Though, we were quickly running out of trees. The ground was not running out of wet. This, I did not adapt to. It was inhumane.

The third day turned up another outpost. This one was a patrol waypoint; it was manned by one Konoha ninja and two from Sand, and just like the previous one, all three were left dead. The waypoint held no information or supplies, nothing that could’ve been the strike team’s target; they were there to kill people, plain and simple. The remainder of the patrol - another trio of one Konoha and two Sand - were left barely a few minutes away, close enough that they’d probably been responding to the rest of their team’s distress call when they were attacked.

“Why Sand?” I asked, kneeling beside one of the bodies and telling myself very firmly that being rational about death didn’t equate to being heartless. Feeling horrified at the waste of human life wouldn’t achieve anything, and even if one of the bodies was shorter than I was, the important thing was that they weren’t me.

Or anyone on the very short list of people I allowed myself to worry about.

Sakura and Naruto were fine, Jiraiya wasn’t actually negligent enough to let them die.

“They’re our allies,” Kakashi said. I shot him a skeptical look at that. “They claim to be our allies,” he amended. “It’s not unusual for them to lend manpower during a war. Would you rather six Konoha nin died instead?”

“I’d rather no one died,” I said dryly, then thought about it. “Oh. They’re here because the village knew the patrol was a lost cause?” I shook my head. I couldn’t even bring myself to be surprised. “But if they knew the patrol would get attacked, why not turn it into a trap? You could put a team of jounin here pretending to be genin corps. Or just a load of clones even.”

“Not many people can use clones like Naruto can,” Kakashi said. “There are too many targets to feasibly replace them all.”

“Yes, but -” I stopped myself, remembering what Pakkun had said about the strike teams just attacking someone else if the one they went for first had been guarded. I already knew that most of Konoha’s forces were concerned with invading Sound before Sound could invade us; as important as it was to stop the strike teams disrupting the wider infrastructure network, they didn’t have the manpower left in the country to defend it all. Like Kakashi said, the best thing to do in a war was to win it before anyone else could die.

I bit my lip. There were other tracker teams. Why make Kakashi the one to hunt the scout? Because he was ANBU? ANBU did the dirty work. You didn’t use ANBU for a simple track-and-retrieve, you used an Inuzuka and a chakra sensor for that. ANBU were for things you didn’t want people to know. Like the fact that when we caught the scout, they’d almost certainly be tortured for information, but that was a fact of life that very few people in a hidden village would have baulked at.

But using your own ninja for bait. Or if Suna turned out to be an ally after all, then using an _ally’s_ ninja for bait, or even arranging it so they’d die as a preemptive strike in case they turned out to be an enemy - no one would admit to that.

I dropped the conversation.

“We’re getting closer, at least,” I said instead. It wasn’t a very subtle change of subject. Still true; we’d gone from finding the first outpost the morning after it had been attacked to finding this one with only four or five hours of delay. It didn’t feel like much progress, but we’d more than halved the scout’s lead.

“We are,” Kakashi agreed. “Too close for them to risk resting. Another couple of days of this and they’ll start flagging and making mistakes, that’s when we move in.” His eyes flicked to me, an assessing look to check on my status. Persistence hunting was a valid strategy, but it rapidly fell apart if the hunters couldn’t keep up.

Like I said though. I could handle the catnaps. I had speed. I had stamina. Apparently, I also had the ruthlessness to deal with the people who died along the way.

“I’m good,” I told him. “It’s Pakkun you should be worried about, he’s the slow one.”

He huffed and glared balefully up at me. “I’ve been outrunning ninja since before you were born, Pup.”

“The old one, then,” I amended, and flashed him a sunny grin. Urushi opened his mouth to let his tongue loll out in laughter, and that alone made it worth it, even if I did get saddled carrying Pakkun for the next four miles as punishment for sass.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Kakashi: please don't be sad about dead people  
> Kakashi: they're dead  
> Kakashi: i'll give you a new jutsu if you stop being sad?  
> Kakashi: look, it's _fire_. you love fire!  
> Kakashi: i have no idea what i'm doing  
> Kakashi: ... i think it worked?
> 
> Ninja stabby times in this chapter: Descriptions of death and dead bodies. Sasuke's coping method involves noticing all the details and fixating on them to avoid the bigger picture; skim read from the first mention of the bodies to when Kakashi starts speaking if this bothers you.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [A Surplus of Wisdom](https://archiveofourown.org/works/24421426) by [Aethelar](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aethelar/pseuds/Aethelar)




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